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In what follows we’ll go over the differences between a page and a profile, and why you should create a page for professional endeavors (such as businesses) you want to promote on Facebook.

Could You Be Using Facebook Better?

If you’re like most people online, you have a Facebook account. And you’ve probably seen posts in your news feed that are geared toward promoting a business, brand, or product. You may have heard somewhere that you should be taking advantage of social media, and Facebook in particular, to promote your own business or project.

But how?

Somewhere in the dark waters of social media marketing, there is massive potential to grow your business and your Facebook profile is just the tip of the iceberg. With the all online marketing opportunities for small businesses, you aren’t sure where to begin or if you are “doing it right”. You may fall into one of these categories:

• (Kind of) Doing it Wrong – You have a Facebook profile you use primarily for friends and family, but you sometimes use it for commercial purposes – to promote your business, organization, brand, or celebrity.
• (Glaringly) Doing it Wrong – You have a Facebook profile masquerading as a business – you use it primarily for commercial purposes and may even have your name and profile image set to your business name and logo.
• (Kind of) Doing it Right – You have a Business page, but you aren’t sure if/when/why/how to use it.
• (Maybe) Doing it Right – You are a public figure with friends and followers on your Facebook profile.

What’s the Difference Between Facebook Pages and Profiles?

What are the advantages of a Facebook page over your Facebook profile anyway?  Here are some differences between the two, to give you a better idea of when pages are more appropriate than your Facebook profile:

	Profiles	Pages
General	For individual, non-commercial use Held under an individual’s name If I friend someone, their updates can appear in my news feed. If I follow someone, their public updates can appear in my news feed	For commercial use by companies, organizations, brands, and celebrities Must be created and managed by individuals with Facebook profiles. If I like a page, that pages updates can appear in my news feed Provide insights to help page admins understand how people are interacting with the page
SEO	Considered less relevant than pages by search engines like Google	Ranked higher than profiles in Google
Optimization	Optimized for personal connections & interactions with aquaintances, friends, & family	Optimized to represent businesses, organizations, artists, and brands and to update and interact with fans
Connections	Unlimited number of followers and maximum of 5000 friends	Unlimited number of fans
Messages	Private messages to can be sent to “friends”	Private messages can be sent to fans, but only after fan sends first message
Limits	One profile per person	Unlimited -create as many pages as you want and assign other profiles/people to administrative roles on the page
Apps	Business and marketing apps are not allowed to be installed on profiles	Pre-installed with apps suited for your page. You also have access to 3rd-party apps designed for pages
Lead Capture	Lead capture apps are not allowed to be installed on profiles	Apps available to gather emails for marketing outside of Facebook
Check-ins and Tags	Friends can tag you in posts and pictures	Pages can be checked in to if their are associated with an actual storefront. This alerts friends of the person checking in that they’re at your storefront. Pages can’t tag personal profiles.
Direct Calling	Facebook can not call you when someone visits your profile	You can be called with the Facebook mobile app when a fan visits your page
Facebook Ads	Limited to “boosting” a post for a set price.	Can create marketing campaigns targeted towards specific demographics and goals (such as getting more likes or collecting emails)
Post Scheduling	Can schedule posts using a 3rd-party app like Post Planner	Scheduling is built-in
Insights	No access to analytics for your posts, friends, or followers	Can access analytics on page post reach, fan demographics, and more

I hope this table gets a point across – Facebook pages are geared towards professional applications while profiles are more personal. You can also read Facebook’s explanation of the difference here.

Should I Create A Facebook Page?

But maybe your profile is getting you enough attention from customers and potential customers to satisfy you. Why then, move your professional side to a Facebook page (or multiple pages)?

As the table above makes apparent, there are several reasons why you’d want to use a Facebook page for you commercial endeavors. To summarize, here are some of the most compelling reasons to use Facebook pages:

• Target Marketing and Analytics (Insights) – I can fine tune my advertising according to who I want to see my posts/ad and what my goals are (more likes, lead capture, etc.) Furthermore, I can see data about my Facebook page to track what efforts are working and who’s paying attention to me.
• Multiple Admins – I can let other Facebook users manage aspects of my Facebook pages without giving them my passwords
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Google ranks Facebook pages higher than Facebook profiles
• Abiding by Facebook’s Terms of Service – By restricting my commercial efforts to a page rather than my profile, I’m not violating Facebook’s terms of service.
• Extensible – Facebook pages allow more room for growth by offering Facebook page apps, post scheduling, check-ins, and an unlimited number of fans.
• Keep Personal and Professional Separate – You won’t bother your friends and family with promotional posts that are more appropriate for clients or fans.

Warning – Don’t Violate Facebook’s Terms of Service

If for no other reason that this, you should move any commercial use of Facebook to a Facebook page. If you are using your profile for commercial purposes, you are violating Facebook’s terms of service, which read:

If you’re a public figure, you can continue posting to your audience from your personal account by allowing followers. When people follow your personal account, they’ll be able to get your updates in News Feed without being friends with you. You should only add someone as a friend when you know them personally.

If you’re not a public figure and you’re using your account to represent something other than yourself, you could risk permanently losing access to your account and all of its content if you don’t convert it to a page.

Moving from A Profile to A Page – Conversion or Creation?

If you’ve decided to start using a Facebook page, you should now consider whether you want to create a new page or convert your existing profile into a page. The advantage to converting a profile to a page is this:

What happens when I convert my Facebook profile to a page?

• All of your friends will instantly be fans of your Facebook page.
• You will lose all of your content (sort of) – Photos, apps, posts, etc. will be removed. If you decide to convert, make sure you download your timeline information (Facebook makes this option available). This will include all of your sent and received messages, photos, and videos you’ve uploaded to Facebook.
• Conversion is irreversible.
• You may have a new URL – By default, your existing profile URL (username) will become your new Facebook page URL. If you decide to change your URL, make sure you update all sites that link to your Facebook with the new address.
• You’ll lose your admin status on any Facebook pages or groups you manage – This also means you should have another account ready to manage the new Facebook page (You can’t manage your new page with your no-longer-existing profile.)

If you think profile to page conversion is the right choice for you, see Facebook’s instructions on profile conversion.

The Alternative – Create a New Page

Especially if your existing profile is primarily used to interact with friends and family (ie, not used for commercial purposes), it makes sense to keep the existing Facebook profile and create a separate Facebook page for your commercial interests. See Facebook’s instructions on creating a new Facebook page.

What About Public Figures?

This is where the issue is a bit more gray. As a public figure (and artist, celebrity, etc.) you have the option of creating a page or having followers (in addition to friends) on your profile. When you post something on your profile, you can choose whether it’s a public or private post. Friends will see both. Followers will see public posts only. You can have an unlimited number of followers.

Here are some questions to ask yourself if you are debating whether to have fans follow your profile or fan your page:

• What is your intention for your fans? – Do you want to market products to fans? Or do you want to share updates from your personal timeline with your fans? If your goal is the former, a Facebook page would be more suitable. If it’s the latter, consider sticking with a Facebook profile. If it’s both, you may want to allow followers to your profile and ALSO create a Facebook page that you use to promote yourself commercially.
• How large is you existing follower base? – If you’ve already got hundreds or thousands of followers and sharing your posts with them satisfies your goal of connecting with fans on Facebook, you may not have a reason to create a Facebook page.
• Do you want any of the features of a Facebook page? – For instance, if you’d like to promote yourself commercially or allow people to check-in to your business, Facebook page creation is a must.

Where to go Next

If you still aren’t sure what your next move should be, check out these resources:

• Facebook Profile or Fan Page? – This article offers multiple opinions on the issue of Facebook pages vs. Facebook profiles and is especially relevant to celebrities and public figures.
• Facebook for Business: Facebook Page vs. Personal Profile – A short summary that hits the most important points
• How to Determine What Kind of Business Facebook Page to Start – A “Dummies” article on choosing the right Facebook page type.
• Should I Have a Facebook Business Page? – An shorter post I did a year ago covering much of the same material.
• Eight Steps to a Facebook Business Page – Once you decide to create a Facebook page, this post will guide you through setting up the basic features.
• Social Networking for Business – Finding Your Style – Alongside Facebook, there are a host of other social networks you can use to promote your business.  This post discusses some considerations when deciding which networks to focus on.

Warning – Avoid Historical Documents

When you are researching a timely issue like this, note article dates – Facebook changes so often that rules and recommendations written one or two years ago may be outdated. If in doubt, you can always go to the source, the Facebook Help Center.

When you have a business website the best practice is to use an email address at that address for your clients and customers. For example,

yourname@yourdomain.com

look and lot more professional than

yourname@gmail.com

In a standard setup, your web hosting provider provides email addresses and an interface for logging in and checking your email. Many people also like to download, read, and respond to their emails in an email client such as Microsoft Outlook or Apple Mail.

Google Apps for Business email offers some distinct advantages to the standard setup.

Advantages of Google Apps for Business Email

• Email everywhere with 100% uptime – Because gmail is a Google cloud-based app, you can access your email from any computer or mobile device with virtually no chance of crashing.
• Organize email instead of deleting it – With 30 GB of storage, you’ll never have to delete old emails. Create folders and store email invoices, receipts, contracts, etc. in different folders. This is great for tax and audit time.
• Use with desktop mail clients – Use Gmail’s POP and IMAP support or Google Apps Sync to work with email clients like Microsoft Outlook, Apple Mail, Mozilla Thunderbird.
• Great spam filtering and security – Gmail is known for it’s excellent spam filtering and security measures like two-step authentication, encrypted connections to Google’s servers, built-in disaster recovery, and simultaneous replicated storage for your email.
• Option to use other Google Apps – In addition to gmail, a Google Apps for Business account gives your access to other Google apps like Drive, Voice, Calendar, Hangouts, IM, and Video.
• Google powered search for your inbox – Finding old emails is a breeze with Google’s search engine.
• Catch all email address – Use any email address ending with @yourdomain.com and it will be sent to your primary inbox. Then set up filters so that emails from different email addresses stay organized. (Alternatively, you can set up distinct inboxes for distinct email addresses. In that case, we would set up additional Google Apps accounts and you would pay for each additional account.)
• Group email options – Option to set up email accounts that all or some members or your business can read to and/or send from.
• And More – Google Apps for Business Benefits page.

Setting Up Google Apps for Business Email

When your Google Apps for Business account is set up, you’ll receive an email with an email addresss, temporary password, and a place to log in to your new account.
Visit the link and sign in with the credentials provided.  If you are already signed in to a google account, you’ll need to choose “Add account” and enter the log in information associated with your new email address.  You’ll be asked agree to some terms and then to change your password to something secure:

That’s it! Once you have entered a new password, you’ll be taken to your Google Apps Dashboard.  From here, you can access all of the apps enabled for your account (including gmail):

Using “Catch-all” email addresses

By default, each Google Apps gets one inbox and there is a fee for each user. So additional inboxes for your domain mean additional fees. This may be important to you if you have more than one person in your business receiving email at the business domain.

If however, you wish to use multiple email addresses and are content to manage them in one inbox, you may do so without any additional configuration. SunCloud Managed Hosting configures all hosted domains with “catch-all” email.  If you aren’t hosted with SunCloud Design, contact Google Apps support for help setting up catch-all email filtering.  Once you have catch-all configured, you can use any address you want (provided it ends in @yourdomain.com):

info@yourdomain.com
contact@yourdomain.com
yourname@yourdomain.com
webmaster@yourdomain.com
support@yourdomain.com

and the emails will come to your inbox. (Note, however, that you must use your primary domain name to log in to your account.)

Setting up filters in your inbox for multiple email addresses

Let’s say you’ve taken advantage of “catch-all” email and now you’re receiving emails to your inbox from multiple email addresses. With gmail, it’s easy to organize these emails into separate folders to keep things organized.

In this example, we’ve sent email to example@sunclouddesign.com which is a made up email address that will nevertheless be received in my inbox thanks to the catch-all filtering. We visit our gmail inbox and see we have received email:

 

To ensure that all email to example@sunclouddesign.com goes into a specific folder, I need to set up a filter in gmail.  To do this, visit the folder icon in the top right of the email and click “Filter messages like these”:

 

Next, a dialog box will appear asking what the parameters of the filter are.  In our case, we want to filter all messages to “example@sunclouddesign.com” so we specify that and then click “Create filter with this search” in the bottom right of the dialog box:

 

After this step, we are presented with a variety of filtering options.  In our case, we want to attach a label which will allow us to easily sort email from different addresses.  We’ll also select “Also apply this filter to matching conversions” to ensure that any emails previously sent to example@sunclouddesign.com will also be caught in the filter:

 

That’s all there is to it.  I hope this entry was helpful for those starting out with Google Apps for Business email.  Questions, comments, and suggestions are encouraged.  How are you using Google Apps for Business?

I’ve helped all kinds of businesses with their web presence, including their facebook presence. While many of my clients already have facebook business pages set up, many business owners don’t see the value in a facebook business page or rely on their personal facebook account to promote their business. For business owners with a personal facebook account but no facebook business page, the question remains:

Should I have a facebook business page or just use my existing personal profile to promote my business?

This person had many facebook friends through his personal account and worried that a business page would be less visible and engaging. This is a consideration, sure, but the big question your should be asking yourself is

How does it make sense to integrate social media in my brand or business?

To guide you in answering this question, see my recent blog entry: Social Networking for Your Business – Finding Your Style.
If you are trying to decide whether to create and promote a facebook business page, here are some differences between a facebook personal page and a business page. Personally, I think creating a business page is a good practice, especially if you already promote your business on facebook.

Facebook Business Page vs. Facebook Personal Profile:

1. Pages give you access to insights

Facebook insights for pages gives you data about your pages in including when it was visited, the reach of your pages posts, the history of “likes” on your page, and how people engage with your page and posts.

2. Pages have unlimited friend count

Personal pages cap the friend count at 5,000. Facebook pages can have unlimited followers.

3. Pages are indexed, so they can show up in search engine results.

4. Pages have tabs so you can create a complete business presence

You can use tabs for things like opt-in forms, maps and directions, contact information, and company history

5. You can use Facebook Offers and advertising with pages

Facebook Offers is an official way to promote deals to your Facebook fans. You can also pay for advertising spots for your page.

6. You can let others manage your page.

Facebook page administrators can create admin roles for others to help manage the page. Roles include insight analyst, advertiser, moderator, content creator, and manager. This is especially useful if you plan to hire third-parties to help manage your web presence.

7. Pages allows check-ins for Places

Pages connected to a Place allow people to check-in on facebook when they visit your physical location. This shows up in there feed and provides free advertising for you.

8. Pages allow cross-business promotion by allowing you to showcase other pages you like

9. Facebook has scheduling built-in for pages

There are third-party services that allow you to schedule posts for personal pages and business pages. Facebook includes this feature “in-house” for pages only.

10. Pages help you keep your personal life private

You can set up access restrictions for your personal page to separate what goes out to personal friends and family and what goes out to your clients and customers, but it is much simpler to keep a personal profile for personal posts and a business page for business posts.

11. There are different third party tools for pages and personal profiles

Many tools set up for pages are meant to help businesses.

12. By setting up a personal profile for your business, you do run the risk of being shut down.

13. Pages let you engage as your brand

When others see posts and comments from your business page, your business or brand name will appear instead of your first and last name.

When you start thinking about online social networking for business the big question your should be asking yourself is

How does it make sense to integrate social media in my brand or business?

Setting up a presence across social media platforms is useful the way that giving your business cards to friends, family, and business partners is useful – it makes your information easier to look up and share. So do set up a presence for yourself on facebook, google+, linkedin, and others. But realize that is can be far more valuable to focus your efforts on engaging online in a way that provides something valuable for your customers or clients. Often this means committing to one or two social media platforms that are compatible with your business.

How do you choose the right social media platform for your business?

Social Networking for Business – Considerations:

1. To increase your SEO (search engine rankings) develop your presence on Google-run platforms.

As far as social networks go, Google+ and YouTube are the best places to build a presence in order to make your business more visible in search engine results.

2. Consider where your target audience is.

If you serve a younger audience, instagram, twitter, and facebook may be the best places to engage. If you serve mostly women, check out pinterest. If you are mostly a B2B (business to business), then it makes sense to engage linkedin. See the resources below for more information.

3. What style of interaction suits you?

Will you be posting mostly pictures? Then Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest will suit you. Do you plan to post articles and create conversations? Then consider Facebook and Google+. Will you have spontaneous deals and specials that only warrant a line of text? Then consider incorporating twitter in your social media strategy.

4. Consider the all of most popular websites and social networks.

Before you exhaust yourself with possible networks, decide what among the most popular websites suits your business’ social engagement style – it may not be an official social network that you end up having the most “social engagement” on. Then, consider places that are explicitly set up for social networking. Here are the most popular websites and social networks of 2013, according to eBizMBA:

Most Popular Websites of 2013:

1. Google
2. YouTube
3. Facebook
4. Yahoo!
5. amazon.com
6. Wikipedia
7. MSN
8. Bing
9. eBay
10. Twitter

Most Popular Social Networks of 2013:

1. Facebook
2. Twitter
3. LinkdIn
4. Google+
5. Pinterest
6. Tumblr
7. Flickr
8. VK
9. Instagram
10. DeviantArt

5. Consider the most popular websites and networks for your niche

For instance, if you are in real estate, you may want to engage with your audience on zillow, trulia, and realtor.com. Almost every large niche website has some form of social engagement available.

6. Make online social interaction about providing a resource rather than advertising and selling.

Ask yourself what you could provide and then ask yourself how you could most provide that resource online.

The best way to engage with your clients and customers online is to provide something of value for them.

If you have a large knowledge-base relevant to your business, you may want to consider blogging regularly and syndicating those blog entries from your website to the social networks where your clients or customers already engage. If you are a photographer, you may just stick to syndicating photographs from your websites gallery pages to social networks. If you have a vast collection of online resources (useful websites), you may set up a “Resources” page on your website and periodically post a URL to your social networks with a short description of that resource.

Additional Resources

Social Networking Demographics

MediaBistro Social User Demographics
A Case Study in Social Media Demographics

eBizMBA

eBizMBA Most Popular Social Networks 2013
eBizMBA Most Popular Websites 2013

I recently attended a webinar by BrightLocal that presented some recent statistics and tools related to online reviews.

Online reviews are important to get, keep getting, and to manage. This is a time-consuming task and many business owners opt to pay someone to manage their web presence for them. Web management may include managing any of the following: online reviews, blog content, social media presence, online event promotion, website updates and upgrades, backlinks, SEO (in general), and web servers.

If you don’t have someone managing all of these components of your web presence, it can be difficult to know where to start. I believe that online reviews are a great place to start because:

1. Reviews are becoming increasingly relevant as people look to the web for business information.
2. They are something that needs to be built over time.
3. There are tools and services available so you can avoid the overhead of paying someone to manage your reviews.

I wanted to share two slides that were presented at the webinar I attended. The first slide shows the Local Business Reviews Ecosystem. In this slide we see how various business directories are out there and how they feed each other:

In terms of importance, most of the panelists considered yelp, Google+, and yahoo! to be the most important places on which to be reviewed. I was surprised to learn that Citysearch is actually working online roulette strategy one of the easiest places for clients to leave reviews and it actually feeds a host of other review sites.

The next slide I want to share is a breakdown of review and reputation management services. I’ve yet to look more closely into each of these, but I wanted to give everyone a chance to do their own research if interested. Some of these services are overkill for a business with a small web presence. In particular, I have heard good things about getFivestars, so I’d check that out first.

Finally, much of the webinar was inspired by the exhaustive 2013 Local Search Ranking Factors report released by moz.com. Check it out here: http://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors

One of the first considerations that arises when creating a web presence is how to find images for a website. Including images on your website has a big impact on visitors that increases engagement and interest in your products and services.
Many small businesses do not have enough quality photos and graphics to optimize the visual component of their website.  This is especially true if for business blogs, where it’s a good idea to include a fresh image with each blog post.  In this entry I will take a look at some resources online that offer stock photography and graphics.  I’ll point you to free and paid resources to build your image collection.
[Read more…] about How to Find Images for a Website