Why you shouldn’t setup pages for companies on your personal Facebook account…: RIA Journal

Pages for companies, they are a boon for marketers online, but how many of them are tied back to personal profiles? I ask because if you are thinking about setting up a page on Facebook for your company, you should think about creating a business account on Facebook. The best part is that they are free & they aren’t connected to your personal profile on Facebook.

Not being connected to your personal profile is extremely important for a couple of reasons. The first is that sometimes people make mistakes and it could lead to having your account on Facebook deleted. It is sad, but it does happen. But then do you know what happens to all the Facebook pages you created? They go with you… to nowhere. Since they are tied to your account, when your account gets deleted so do they. This can be very bad for companies large and small.

The second reason why you don’t want it tied to your profile is what happens if you leave the company or the companies page that you set up for them no longer does business with you. By setting up the page under your personal profile you will always have access to those pages. There is no way to transfer ownership of a page or to remove the creator from being an admin of the page. You are effectively stuck with it. Facebook may be able to alleviate the situation by contacting your sales rep, but it remains to be seen if they can or not.

The third reason you shouldn’t tie it to your personal account is that if you are the owner of the page you can never post comments to the page without looking like you are the mouthpiece of that company. Try it some time if you are the owner/admin of a page. You can’t post anything to the wall without looking like you are speaking for the company. It is easy to forget this sometimes and accidentally post something to the page. People are people after all.

The best situation is to make use of the business accounts on Facebook. When you set up a business account on Facebook you can tie it to a new email address on gMail that you can easily transfer to another company or person if you stop working somewhere.

Here is how you do it:

If you are logged into facebook, log out.
Go to facebook.com
Under the “Sign Up” form there is a link “To create a page for a celebrity, band, or business click here”.
click on that link
you will then be presented with a screen so that you can create your new page
create your new page here and use your email address that isn’t tied to anything on facebook
after completing the form and verifying your email address you will be brought to the page you just created so you can edit it.

You can add as many pages as you want to a business account, but if I were you I would have a seperate business account for each of your clients. It not only keeps them separated and easy to manage, but allows you to have a way to turn the account over to them if you have to.

The homepage of your business account is a basic ad and page manager screen. I hope this proves useful to you. Enjoy!