Facebook makes changes and is updating its user interface to keep up with the trends and growing needs of social media. As part of those changes, Facebook introduced business and group pages in addition to personal profile pages.
What is a profile page?
When you sign up, the first thing you have to do is create a personal profile page. This page represents you as an individual person.
These are some of the characteristics of a profile page:
Represents an individual person
The main goal is to connect with friends.
Limited to 5000 friends
Friends must be approved
The visibility of the page and its parts can be regulated through the privacy settings.
Personal status updates appear on your wall along with your friends’ posts on your wall
Typically a person only has one personal profile page
What is a fan page?
Facebook Pages allow public persons, businesses, organizations, and other entities (for example, a gang) to create a public presence on Facebook. These pages are public by default and anyone can become a fan by clicking the “Like” button at the top of the page.
These are the characteristics of a fan or business page, which will highlight the differences with the profile page:
Represents a public person, company or other entities.
The main goal is to create a platform to publish content for anyone who follows
Unlimited number of followers
Fans or followers do not need to be approved: anyone can click “Like” and can follow posts, updates, news, etc.
By default, visibility is public to everyone on the Internet
Status updates are divided into 3 categories (like 3 different walls): page own updates, others, and both together. This allows viewers to order updates.
The page’s own updates are displayed on the wall, for others, you need to change the tab
Any page is created and managed through a personal account.
One person can manage multiple fan pages
Advantages of a fan page
If you want to create a platform to showcase your business, you definitely want to create a fan page. The advantages are numerous:
ยท Your friends will see the fan pages you just followed and could share them with their friends; thus one page advertising becomes bigger than just your circle of friends
Followers are not limited as in personal profiles.
Followers do not need to be approved
Personally, I have created several business pages for my own businesses and other people’s organizations. One of the pages that I created showed me the ability to reach beyond anything we can imagine: in 18 months there were more than 15,000 people following this particular page, just by ‘word of mouth’ from one friend to another in Facebook, without me promoting it at all!