Facebook: Profiles vs. Pages and the ART of Giving Back

2012/July by Marji Laine 8 Comments

The Facebook situation is fun if your just doing the social thing, but for writers and business folks, Facebook provides opportunity to share a message. And used well, it can stir a great following for that message.

But first and foremost, Facebook is social.

Profiles

That’s why anyone using it must have a profile. (Only one to a customer, please.) The profile is the social face of the person. And that section has benefits and rules connected to it.

For instance, on a profile, a person “friends” other people. You friend them and they accept you. So you have a little community of happily cohabitating friends that connect with others as well as each other. When you take a picture of one of these friends, you can “tag” them in it and a notice goes up on their board that you did. They stop whatever they are doing and run over to your wall to check out the picture you took of them.

Cute. Studly. What’s that thing hanging out of your nose?

Anyway. I digress. The point is, you can make a status report or post a note or photo and tag your friends to inform then that it is there and includes them. They’ll come look. No really. They will.

Pages

Pages are different. Being for businesses, nobody can friend them. Sad and lonely place to be. They can be liked though and a whole lot more than just the profiles. See profiles can only add 5,000 friends, but page likes go up and and up. I’m not even sure they have a limit. So as your business grows, so can your outreach.

In the “voice” of your page, you can post on your own page. You can “like” other people’s pages. You can even post on those pages you’ve liked. However, you can’t friend anyone. So you can’t post to anyone’s profile, even if they like your page. You can’t comment on any profile at all.

One is the loneliest number …

There are benefits to pages though. A page establishes a writer as professional. Once published, those books can become part of the timeline and also tabs on the front page. Second, pages offer statistics that you can’t get with your profile. I can see at a glance how many people have liked me, how many have visited my page, and how many have liked or commented on anything I’ve said.

The other stat that I’ve recently noticed makes it clear that Facebook isn’t showing all of my page postings to all of those who liked my page. For instance, the last post on my page was an announcement of yesterday’s blog. Only 20 people saw it. Not that 20 people visited the link. The post only showed up on the feeds of 20 of those who have liked my page. The other 147 went along without knowing that I posted anything.

*Sniff*

So here is some Über-important things you can do, for me and any of your Facebook paging buddies.

• Like their page. A page-owner can only invite you once. If you choose not to like their page, you withhold essential encouragement for no good reason. Liking doesn’t hurt. Doesn’t cost. Doesn’t fill your feed with spam. It just encourages your friend.
• Like any posts that you see from their page. Again, unless it disagrees with your moral fiber – and I totally get that and won’t chat about politics for that very reason! Yikes! – there’s no good reason to deny your friend the little click of a mouse key. And what do they get when you like a post. BIG! It doubles the amount of people who see the post, giving them a better chance of getting out their message.
• Really want to be a good friend? Share their posts. Sharing the ones they post from their profile is fun, but it doesn’t help their business. Sharing posts from their page means SO MUCH! When a page owner has their posts shared, Facebook decides they deserve more attention and shares their following posts with more people.

Didn’t realize you had such power at the tips of your fingers did you? Use the power for good, Luke!

By the way, you can find me at http://www.facebook.com/MarjiLaine