Creating an individual profile attached to your Facebook Page

Now, this is the second post on this theme of creating and setting up a Facebook Page for your business or organisation. If you are interested in how to create and choose categories, the post is here.

I am going to share my experience of the next step. Once you have a Page created for your organisation, then you can go onto that Page, have people liking it and post to your wall but your general functionality is limited.

You will get a warning from Facebook every time you log in that you need to create an individual profile for your page – top right corner. The distinction here is between having a Page for your business and an Individual Profile.

I will try and make it short. A Page is made and encouraged by Facebook for businesses. You have all your fans, your events and your interactions (comments etc) in one place – easy to manage. Your posts onto your Facebook Page will show in your fans’ newsfeed.

With an individual profile, Facebook again encourages your to put a name of a person down and not the name for your business. They can delete your profile at any time if they find you have not obeyed by this rule. It is common sense really. With an individual profile, you can basically manage multiple Pages for various causes, organisations and businesses, without them being interlinked in any way.

Creating an individual profile will allow you enhanced features on your business Page. If you just set up the Page, you will be limited on what you can do with your Page.

- sending messages to new people on Facebook
- posting on other people’s or organisations’ walls
- search results do not appear in full if an individual profile is not created

These are important features if you are trying to get people liking your page.

When I started my organisation’s Page, I set up my Individual Profile and then started sending some messages to some key people that I knew were on Facebook, posted on a few walls. So looked them up, sent them a message with my new Page address and them it becomes viral. You will not be able to do any of this without an Individual Profile.

When creating an Individual Profile (which does not have to appear on your Page) you just have to put a name down and a few details. From then onwards, you can enjoy the full functionalities of Facebook. This Individual Profile will be the Administrator of the Page.

I am not using my Individual Profile in any way for the business – this means that all promotional messages and any interactions – comments, inviting at events etc is done through the organisations Page rather from the Individual Profile attached to it. This is to save a lot of confusion from the people interacting with your organisation. It is best to channel your communications and efforts to one and make it stand out.

When logging in, you will see your Individual profile as default and to get onto your business Page, go on the right hand-side top corner and select Manage Pages – your Page will appear in the list (or if you manage multiple pages, they will all appear there).

Next post will be on how to Manage multiple pages – become administrator or leave a Page as admin.