“Should I Have a Facebook Business Page or a Personal Profile to Promote My Business?”
This is a very common question of late, with a somewhat complicated answer and explanation.
Facebook business pages have seen a steady decline in engagement since 2013, with more drastic troughs along the way, leaving many page managers today wondering how and why they used to get lots of engagement and now they barely reach anyone.
It is a very common and long-running misunderstanding that all of a page’s “Likes” see everything posted by that page.
Additionally, Facebook has explained recently that as the years go on, people “Like” more and more pages and make more connections of all types and there’s simply no room in the news feed for so many updates.
This is combined with Facebook’s current “default” view for users within their own news feed, which is composed of updates deemed relevant to the user by Facebook, and one must actively choose to view “most recent” updates to see a chronological log of posts from their connections.
All of this means that Facebook has complete control over what a typical user sees when they log in to Facebook, and pages have fallen out of favor over the last year, thus the pitiful reach and engagement that page managers see today.
In addition to this though, Facebook has announced efforts over the past 12 months to further “personalize” the news feed, most recently favoring updates from friends, groups, and events over business pages.
On the matter of content, it is true that at this point, video tends to be the most favored and far-reaching type, followed by photos/albums, and finally the dreaded “link posts”, which seem to require paid promotion to attain any significant reach presently, regardless of past success.
Some have suggested that using a personal profile to represent and effectively promote a business is ideal at this point, as page managers see more engagement on their personal profile updates. We disagree with this as anything other than a short-term solution that is by no means guaranteed to be worth the effort.
While it certainly helps for individuals to share posts from pages on their personal accounts, it can be difficult to compel employees and associates to do this, and a personal profile created only for work purposes will have a difficult time attaining any significant reach.
It’s also likely to be a poor long-term investment, as Facebook has cracked down on individual profiles acting on behalf of businesses, which is why many people who hadn’t used their real name in their profile, e.g. “Pizzatime Restaurant” (fictional example) have been prompted by Facebook to change the account to reflect a real person or face possible disabling.
Also, without the time and effort put into a legitimate personal profile vs. one created only for a possibly temporary connection to a business and its promotion, there’s a greatly diminished potential for any reach beyond what the business page would have attained, if not far less.
Fortunately, the past month saw updates to Facebook’s platform that made it far easier for businesses to connect with potential customers, including Messenger for Business, which allows business pages to communicate directly with individuals. The process has been streamlined especially on mobile, where the “call-to-action” button is now highlighted in blue and quite prominent.
It’s no secret that Facebook does indeed have an interest in soliciting paid advertising from businesses, especially those that have paid for Likes in the past. It seems that this has been a very profitable coup for Facebook (the so-called bait-and-switch tactic of telling businesses to pay for Likes years ago and then making them pay to reach those Likes today).
However, with clever usage of both the organic potential of your page and effective paid promotions, you can still drive a large amount of traffic and thereby interest from Facebook.
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