A common error that we are finding in health care Facebook pages is that small businesses are setting up the wrong type of page. They are missing out on key business features and potential fans. Here’s a short description of the problem and how to fix it.

The problem is that these businesses are setting up their pages as personal pages instead of as business pages. Three disadvantages:

  • Losing potential fans: Business pages let people “Like” the page without friending. Liking a page is the equivalent of signing up to have your posts appear in their newsfeeds. Personal pages have instead the “+1 Friend” option. When a person clicks this, it gives the business access to personal information. People who value their privacy will not click “+1 Friend” on a business page that is set up wrong.
  • Loss of Tools: Business pages have great tools that personal pages do not. Not the least of which is Facebook Insights – a tracking feature that lets you see how many people see each post, how many people are clicking what, how many people are generating negative feedback about your posts, demographics on your fans and much more.
  • Loss of Your Page: Because personal pages will gain more access to user information than Facebook intended for businesses to have, Facebook reserves the right to cancel your business page if they see that you have set it up as a personal page.

In Facebook, you must first have a personal page. Then you use that personal page to build and administrate your business pages. The good news is that if you have made this error, all is not lost. Facebook has a feature for migrating personal pages to business pages: https://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php?migrate