Something we’ve been seeing a lot of lately is businesses who’ve obviously put significant work and effort into developing a Facebook presence, but sadly without checking out the rules of the road first. If we were going for the shortest blog post of the year award, this would just consist of the following two images:

YES! Your page is correctly set up.

facebook screenshot

All present and correct

Er, NO. You really didn’t want to do it that way:

facebook screenshot

It's bad news I'm afraid, Mr Smith...

The screenshots are probably more than sufficient for most, but just in case… here are the details as marked up by the inimitable Rose McGrory pink crayon:

Businesses do not have Friends, Education & Work history, or Likes & Interests. If your page does, it’s because you’ve set it up as a personal profile during the initial registration process. Facebook takes a very dim view of this, and in due course is likely to take down your page. Businesses SHOULD have the all-important “like” button, and a list of people who like that page.

If you’ve set up your page incorrectly, you really should sort things out sooner rather than later – if you continue to promote it and gain “friends” in the wrong format, you may lose all your work if the page gets deleted by Facebook.

The good news is that there’s an easy fix for this – a relatively little known function exists which allows you to migrate your personal page into a business page. Have a look here: changing facebook profile to a business page.