Social Media: A Page or a Profile?

Keep your personal profile and your organization’s page separate. Facebook currently limits how many “friends” you can have, but does not limit how many “likes” you can get.

So, if you are using your personal profile to push your organization’s agenda, you are setting yourself up for a difficult transition down the road. Once you reach the limit of “friends” (currently set to 5,000), that’s it — no one else can connect with you. Then, you’ll spend countless hours trying to get your “friends” to “like” your organization’s new page, and only a very small percentage of them will because they are YOUR friends – not your organization’s. After all, have you “liked” all of your friend’s places of business? I didn’t think so.

They don’t want to connect with your organization — they are friends with you because they want to be friends with YOU. Plus, if only your friends “liked” your organization’s page, it doesn’t really do you a lot of good because chances are those people know what you do anyway. The object of having a presence on Facebook for your organization is to make NEW connections in addition to strengthening the ones that you already have.

Your friends likely won’t do business with you, but there are scores of people that you don’t know that are interested in what your organization provides. Using your personal profile instead of having a “page” limits Facebook users from finding your organization, and even if they did find you, sending a “friend” request to connect with a business or ministry is not the way they are accustomed to using Facebook, which just shows them that you don’t know what you are doing.