The word was beginning to spread like wildfire that if you were in business, you NEEDED to be on Facebook. Just as MySpace went from being used for personal networking to business networking, Facebook started seeing the same type of results. People wanted to use Facebook as a marketing platform to reach the 100’s of millions of users. So of course, many businesses started jumping on the bandwagon to follow the crowds.
Facebook was smart about the individuals using their platform for business, unlike MySpace, that they created a friend cap of 5000. With this cap, Facebook forced individuals to stick to creating and making real friendships. Businesses wouldn’t want to use this because obviously you want more than 5000 “friends” following your business. Then, Facebook made one of the smartest decisions ever, and gave users the ability to make a profile FOR business… or a Public Figure, organization, etc.
Now people can make Facebook profiles for business, A Fan Page, with an unlimited amount of followers. They even went as for as making it against Facebook policy to use a personal profile for business.
The bad news, this wasn’t much of a public and well known creation. What ended up happening was that there was a continued use of personal Facebook profiles being operated AND created for business. This would lead to many accounts simply “disappearing” and individuals getting upset because of it.
For a while I was giving friends and friends of friends who had business profiles on Facebook a heads up. I even started to see an influx of individuals creating personal Facebook profiles for businesses. I told as many of them as I could that they were going about it wrong and they could face deletion… but no one seemed to listen.
But NOW, Facebook is stepping up their deletion of businesses using personal profiles. As an organization who is in the social media field, I feel its my obligation to warn as many people about this. If you are STILL going about it wrong or you are thinking about creating a presence on Facebook… Get a Fan Page before its too late and all is lost! Do it right! If you already have a presence of 1000 “Friends”, hurry and create a Fan Page and get them to “Like” you instead. This may seem like your starting all over, but its better to start now instead of after your profile “Disappears”.
