The Pros and Cons of Using a Facebook Profile But Not an Official Page

Facebook page
Photo credit: mkhmarketing via VisualHunt / CC BY

One of the first marketing tasks given to authors by agents, publishers, and publicists is: Start an official Facebook page.

So far, I have not done this for myself. Instead, I use my Facebook profile with the “following” function turned on. That means I have private friends, but also public followers.

I want to discuss the pros and cons of this choice, but first I’ll describe the history of my experience and how I ended up in this situation to begin with. (Scroll down to the pros and cons if you’re impatient.)

2006–2009: “Real” Friends Only

I joined Facebook in 2006. At first, I only friended people I knew well and had met in person—and I rarely received requests from strangers. These were the days (hard to imagine now) when few people used the site.

As I started speaking and meeting writers at conferences, and especially once I started blogging, I tentatively started friending people I had virtual relationships with, but had not met. It felt a little dirty, because at that time, Facebook used to ask for confirmation on how you knew someone, and if you couldn’t verify it, you received an informal reprimand.

Then I noticed that some of my colleagues with even more liberal friend policies had engaged communities of people around them, and valuable discussions were happening in the comments. So I decided to open the door to anyone who asked. (At this point in the game, Facebook didn’t offer a way for people to “follow” you.)

2009-2011: Everyone’s a Friend!

My Facebook use has been fairly conservative when it comes to the private details of my life. Probably the most personal things I share are travel photos and cat pics.

Zelda sleeping on treadmill

So it wasn’t a big deal to me to open things up to anyone who wanted to be my friend, and I felt safe doing so, as I had no other privacy concerns or considerations. (This is important to note, because, well, some people do!)

Every time I accepted a friend request, I tagged that person as part of a particular list or group. I had one group that was basically for people I didn’t know, but I assumed knew me from Writer’s Digest.

I started posting about content at my blog, and answering people’s questions about writing and publishing. My use was so consistently related to my work that a friend remarked I was the only person he knew whose Facebook profile was used for professional purposes, and that the last time he checked my profile, a window popped up to accept his credit card. (Ouch.)

Back then, as today, personal profiles max out at 5,000 friends. My reasoning was that I was nowhere near the limit, and until I had a book or a product, it really didn’t make sense for me to manage two distinct presences on Facebook if they would be posting essentially the same thing.

2012: The Great Unfriending

After two years, I was approaching 4,000 friends, and I began reflecting on my growing discomfort with that number, and my lack of control. I was receiving way too many requests (games, messages, events), and I had to mute most of my new friends because I wasn’t seeing anything from my actual friends.

Then, Facebook debuted a new feature called “Subscribe,” which allowed people to follow your public posts. (This is now the “Follow” function.) I was elated.

But I had a difficult decision to make. To unfriend people was going to create ill will—but would it be a more honest reflection of the actual relationship? I also believed a friends number in the hundreds would strongly suggest that people should subscribe, not friend, unless they knew me.

I’m still not confident it was the right solution, but I unfriended more than 3,000 people over two days; those people were automatically turned into subscribers by Facebook (although not counted officially in my public Subscriber number).

2012–present: Friends + Followers

I’ve stuck with a conservative friending policy, although the large majority of my Facebook posts are public and related to the writing and publishing community. My following is now 6,500+.

Friedman profile on Facebook

The Pros of Using a Facebook Profile Professionally

  • The biggest advantage, by far, is that you only manage one Facebook account, which saves you time and energy. (Also, I really like having focused attention in one place.)
  • Some believe that personal profiles get better visibility in Facebook newsfeeds. It feels like that could be true, but who really knows? Ultimately, I’m not sure it makes a huge difference, because if you post content that people don’t engage with, they will see fewer of your posts over time. That’s just how the Facebook algorithms work.
  • By using a personal profile, you can engage with individuals and comment on their posts, and also tag individuals in posts, which isn’t possible with an official page.
  • I was able to register with Facebook as a public figure and receive the verified blue checkmark next to my name. This allows me access to Facebook Mentions—and is how I can produce Facebook Live Video—just the same as a business page.
  • Frankly, I like mixing the personal and professional. I’m a multi-faceted person, and while the face I present is undoubtedly crafted in some way, everything we do is crafted to tell a story about ourselves. It doesn’t bother me.

The Cons of Using a Facebook Profile Professionally

  • The biggest disadvantage: You’ll miss out on the functionality offered by official business pages. You won’t get any demographics or insight into the people who follow you, no information about how many people your posts reach, no access to the advertising tools (although it’s easy enough to work around this last issue). You also can’t add new tabs to the page, and you can’t add a fancy call-to-action button (Buy Now, Sign Up, Subscribe, etc). You’re stuck with whatever Facebook makes available to personal profiles. So there are real limitations if you want to do some hard selling, conduct contests or giveaways, or otherwise be very strategic about making Facebook pay.
  • While no one has ever told me this, I must assume that I’ve alienated some percentage of my real friends who have zero interest in posts about writing and publishing. Fortunately, a lot of the people I consider friends also work in the industry, but still: I imagine my public posts can be a mix of dull or irrelevant, which means I risk being muted indefinitely by a fair number of friends. I also typically restrict myself to one post per day to reduce the noise for others, but if I had a business page, I believe I’d be posting several times a day.
  • Conversely, if I make a public post that isn’t about writing and publishing, it’s a quick way to get followers to leave. Sometimes when I post off-topic, especially on any issue that might have political tension associated with it, there’s usually at least one person who comments that I should stick to posts about writing and publishing.

A word about the risks of using a personal profile professionally

You’ll find all kinds of warnings about using a personal profile for anything remotely related to business—some say it will get you kicked off Facebook. So I expect the comments of this post to include at least one warning or two from someone who had their personal profile shut down because they ran afoul of Facebook’s Terms of Service.

If you actually read my long history of using Facebook, then you can see it’s obvious I use Facebook for soft forms of marketing without getting kicked off. Even Mark Zuckerberg himself doesn’t have a fan page; he has a public profile with the following turned on, like I do. This use isn’t uncommon among public figures.

Still, though, there might be a risk if the following describes you:

  • You aren’t using your real name, or you’re representing yourself inaccurately.
  • Your friends or followers consistently complain about your activity or report your posts as spam.
  • You try to conduct contests, giveaways, or business activity on your profile.
  • You use your profile as a sales and advertising bullhorn. I call this the “hard sell.”

Making the Right Decision for You

So, how do you decide what to do? Here are the 5 biggest considerations.

  • If you have privacy concerns, then the answer is easy: Start an official business page.
  • If your audiences don’t mix, start an official business page. For example, many teachers and therapists would not be comfortable with their audiences mixing on their Facebook profile. Or romance or erotica authors probably don’t want discussions of their work on a personal profile where grandma might hang out.
  • If you have a pen name, start an official business page.
  • For unpublished or new authors who want to simplify or streamline their online presence and don’t see the need for the additional functionality of a business page, start with a profile with followers.
  • For new authors who have a strong personal Facebook presence, and feel comfortable mixing the personal and professional, start with a profile with followers.

If you succeed at getting friends and followers on your profile, but later decide you need the functionality of a business page, Facebook allows you to convert your profile to an official page. I may do this myself in the future. (However, as Chris Syme points out in the comments of this post, it will involve some level of sacrifice—for starters, you lose all your past posts.)

A final note: It can be very difficult to get likes for an official Facebook page if you’re not already active online. You must promote your Facebook activity on your website, email newsletter, other social media networks, at events, and anywhere else you can think of. You may even end up buying Facebook ads to get the ball rolling. If that sounds daunting, then you might not be ready for an official page quite yet.

I’d love to hear about your Facebook experiences in the comments, especially if you use a personal profile with the following turned on. How’s it going?

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Marquita

I closed my FB page about 6 months ago and started using my profile exclusively. For the record, I haven’t missed the page. I do think the kind of business you’re in may make a difference. My focus is to help others develop emotional resilience and I write about and teach how to do that, so my posts tend to be well received by pretty much everyone. I will say I’m very selective about friend requests and turn down more than I accept. I know Darren Rowse of Problogger fame also uses his profile and has a huge following, so as far as I can see it does work.

Mitzi Flyte

I like keeping professional and writing FB pages separate.
I have a personal FB page under my married name and an author page under my writing name. The author page has about half the number of followers as my personal page and I’m trying to increase that. Because I write horror/paranormal and mystery, I post articles about that on the author page, along with articles about writing. Unfortunately I seem to do more on my FB author page than my website/blog and I must work on changing that.

Lexa Cain

Timely post for me. My agent told me to get a profile and an author page 3 yrs ago. I didn’t do too much with them except get 500 friends on the profile and announce sales on the author pg. Then I fired my agent, changed my pen name, and self-published. With my new profile I got 4 times the friends as the old profile in only 6 months. Now I was getting 10 times the number of “likes” per post, and good interaction. But I didn’t know what to do with that old Author page I hated so much. If I wanted it to work, I had to post actual content not just ads about sales, and who has time for that? But a week ago, I took the plunge. I changed the author pg name to the new pen name, am inviting likes from both profiles, and am coming up with content (funny pics and a few shares of other authors’ books works for me). I’m aiming for 5k friends on the new pen name and for 15k followers for its author page. I need the extra reach now that I know marketing and selling is all up to me. Agents and publishers always did zip for me. So far, it’s going well! 🙂

Alexis

I have a personal profile and a page and a large active Facebook group so I feel I swim in all of the potential pools within FB. My feeling is that the marketing advantages of a page (having a signup button, ability to run contests, reporting about who sees your content, who likes your page, page growth statistics, ability to run advertising campaigns) all trump the ease of managing a single profile.

Victoria

I have a personal page and two author pages (one for my writing and the other one is specific to a book I’m just starting on that’s a departure from what else I’ve written).

My author pages are just that. On one I post about writing, friendship, and grief; the other I only post on that book and the topic. Nothing personal. The analytics are very interesting to me and helpful beyond words (especially since that book won’t be published until late next year).

My personal page is personal. I know everyone who friended me. They’re either friends of mine IRL or they’re trusted friends of friends. I’m picky about the friend requests I accept, so the numbers there are a fraction of what they are on my author pages.

Periodically I post a disclaimed on my personal page: you’re welcome to stay here, but here are the topics I post about (liberal politics, AIDS, St. Louis Cardinals, theatre, British television, chocolate, etc.). I invite people to move over to my author pages if they prefer. I rarely post about my writing, unless it’s an unusual situation (book launch or award or appearance). And I assure them that if they leave, I won’t be insulted.

I have a friend who’s published over 40 books. She refused to separate. Over the past several years, she’s been called on the carpet by her publisher and agent for alienating potential readers because of political posts. Is that why her publisher dropped her? I don’t know. But although I’m self-published, I never felt comfortable mixing the two.

Yes, it’s a little more work. But honestly, it’s kept me focused on my audiences. And in this political season, I think it’s more important than ever.

Jan Rider Newman

“Feeling a responsibility to speak out on some issues (and accept the consequences).” Exactly. I wait for the sky to fall when I post some things, but we have to speak up.

S. J. Pajonas

So, I’d like to point out that even though I follow you, and I constantly set FB to show me Recent Posts, I never see your posts on Facebook. Which sucks because as a follower, I’m only getting stuff the FB algorithm lets me see, much like Pages. So I just went in and told it to let me see your posts first. But that’s another thing to be aware of, that “following” posts act like Page posts in that they get caught up in the algorithm.

Regardless, I have a personal profile with following turned on and I friend most authors. Everyone else I kick to “following” and then I have FB Pages for my author brand (and a new one for a pen name). I like having Pages because of the targeting, insights, and the ability to tie my ads to the page. And if you work your posts to your Page right, you get good reach. So I like having both.

Diana Urban

Great post, Jane! This is something that I’ve grappled with. Right now I have a public personal profile, where I do get some followers. But I also have my author Facebook page with about 500 likes. I haven’t promoted it much yet since I don’t have anything published (yet). If I publish the same post to my personal profile and my page, the post on my personal profile always gets more engagement. If it were easy to convert the 500 page likes into followers on my personal profile, I’d probably switch to using just my profile, since I don’t like posting very personal things anyway. BUT I’d really like to use ads once I get my books published someday. So. I still don’t know what the right answer is. 🙂

Yvonne Hertzberger

I have both a profile and a business page but am seriously considering closing the bus98iness page. I get very little traffic there and find that my interactions on my profile page garner more interest in my writing. Perhaps that is because they see at least a little more of who I am and what I stand for.

Robin E. Mason

i started a professional page late in 2013, before i published my debut. I am also an artist and interior decorator so it was a bit all over the place. as i have grown in my writing, and published #2 (and working on #3) i do as you mention, and on my author page am more open to who’s there. my personal page is still just that, personal. either way, it’s the INTERNET and i don’t share the most personal and certainly not confidential anything! i am building my blog –> website, too, for greater traffic and interation!
thanks for another great post, Jane!

Mona AlvaradoFrazier

Listing the pro’s and con’s of FB personal and FB page made me feel better about closing my FB page. This saved me time better used for my blog and Twitter (both which I enjoy much more than FB).

I don’t post personal things (mostly links to WordPress posts, travel photos, quotes) and I found much more engagement that way than through a page. I like the ability to post an item publicly or to the family only.

The good thing that happened when I closed my page was that FB put my pen name right under my FB personal name, in parenthesis.