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!

Lets say you were a brand that had a page with less than 1000 fans as of May 31st. You weren’t eligible to sign your brand up for a vanity page. Come saturday night a user comes on and sets up a vanity URL for their profile. Now there is someone essentially squatting on your trademark and potentially confusing consumers of your brand. Lets say you are XYZ company and you have a page, but didn’t qualify for the May 31st cutoff and someone else registers your URL. Whenever a consumer comes to facebook/xyz they will see a user’s profile page instead of your product.

There is also the issue of got there first. This happened with a brands that I know who are in the public space. Someone got on, started a new profile and registered that brand’s vanity instead of it actually being that brand. Now that brand also had a fan page that they had more than 1000 fans on and had intended on using that vanity URL for their fan page. They now find themselves out of luck with someone infringing on their brand name and having to wait for facebook or for their lawyers to act on it.

What facebook should have done in my opinion was take a staged approach to the issue and opened the gates up to pages first and then opened it up to the general public. It may have alleviated some of the problems that we are now seeing, some of which may have to be fought out in court.

On the downside, if you did register a vanity URL that is a trademark of another company, you will probably loose your account and everything you created… FAIL for users as well…

Here is the link to the trademark infringement form:
http://www.facebook.com/copyright.php?noncopyright_notice=1

PageData – Facebook Page Metrics from Inside Facebook.

Example data:

Two of the best ways to go about marketing yourself through Facebook besides your main profile are Facebook Groups and Facebook Fan Pages. While both are similar in concept, there are some key differences to keep in mind when you’re setting them up.

I would advise you to create both a group and a fan page, because while they perform similar functions e.g. as outlets and communities for your like-minded fans/visitors/clients/friends to meet and share about whatever topic you’ve chosen for your page or group, they offer several different options.

Here’s a breakdown of what they offer side by side:

Lets say you have a product called “carx”. You take “carx” and create a nice .com site for it with campaigns that drive traffic to it, etc. That all takes money, sure that is fine, but for free you can do much the same thing, but using word of mouth to drive traffic to your site and help you build brand identity.

Here are a couple of things you may not have known about a fan page:

• It is indexed by google, whereas groups are not.
• You can add custom bits of FBML code that allows you to customize the group page, which you can’t do with groups.
• You can add applications, which you can’t do with groups.
• You can restrict the fan page so that only you can post information, basically turning off the ability to allow fans to add content. This lets the fan page function much as a normal website does, allowing you to dish out content.

I do think that companies and agencies alike are missing an opportunity here to grow into social markets and take hold of the brand identity on those sites. I have seen lots of user generated fan pages for products. While that is great, the company has no control over what is posted on those fan pages and some of those pages have hundreds of thousands of fans. If the company that owned that product had been the one creating that page they would have had control over messaging for their brand.

I guess that is the thing about situations like this. If you don’t get on the boat fast enough, it will sail and leave you standing on the dock. If you have questions about Facebook fan pages, feel free to ask me below and I will be happy to help.