Profiles and pages do the same thing, right?
Wrong.
They’re very different, and they achieve different things. Today we’re going to look at the difference between them and the pros/cons of having a page vs a profile when it comes to chatting with your fans and customers.
What’s a Facebook Profile?
A Facebook profile is your personal account on Facebook and you need one of these to create a Facebook page. It needs to be in your own name and you can only have one of them. If you have a secondary profile or a profile under a pseudonym, Facebook is liable to pull it down because it breaches its Terms of Conduct.
What’s a Facebook Page?
A Facebook page is less personal than a profile. People who aren’t your friends can view it and choose to like and follow the page and you can advertise through a page, which you can’t do on your personal profile.
A Facebook Page also includes more information for small businesses that its customers want to know: for example, the address, telephone number and contact details and can support links to external websites, ticket sales and blogs much better than a personal profile can.
Which one is better to use?
There’s a lot of reasons why you might not want to mix your profile with your public persona. For one, you’d have to accept a lot of strangers as your friend (or set your privacy to nil, meaning they can see it all without being your friend). Having a profile that’s separate from your page means you can retain your private life while still being a business owner, actor, comedian or someone in the public eye.
1. Facebook Pages also give you tonnes of advertising opportunities that profiles simply don’t support. You want to sell tickets to your upcoming show? On your personal profile, you can share a link. On your Page you can share a link and boost it so an extra 10,000 or even 100,000 people can see it. Which is obviously going to get you quite a few more clicks than the kind shares of your friends and family.
2. Pages also give you ‘Insights’ which means you can keep a track of how well you’re doing. You can see how many people are following you, whether they like the stuff you’re posting and whether they’re reacting to your Page in the way you want them to (whether that’s clicking on your website, purchasing something or signing up to a mailing list.)
3. Another thing is there’s no limit on the number of Pages you can manage, whereas you can only have one profile. Facebook’s Terms of Service are super clear about this. They want people to use their real name on their platform and they will actively delete accounts that they think are using an incorrect name or are a duplicate account.
4. Plus, Pages have more visibility. Everyone can see them, by default, without having to request access from you or anyone else. Which means Facebook is doing a lot of the hard work for you, your audience can find your Page without any trying on your part (although you might want to publish some cool stuff on there to keep them coming back.)
Penguin in the Room @prartsmarketing is a group of creatives with an arts marketing dream: penguin stepping our way into the arts industry and helping other creatives flourish! Specialising in online marketing, social media, branding, copy writing, media coaching and web design for actors, artists, casting directors, agents, production companies, theatre companies and creative individuals.
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