A Business Page Versus a Personal Profile

Why people use a personal profile

Because it is where the audience already is.

A trade with four hundred local connections built over a decade has a genuine local network, and a new business page starts at zero.

Posts from a person also reach more people than posts from a page, which is a real and widely observed difference.

Which makes it a rational short-term choice, and the problems arrive later.

What goes wrong

• A hard limit on connections, which a growing business reaches.
• It cannot be transferred or sold with the business.
• No useful statistics about what reaches anybody.
• No advertising, since ads run from pages.
• It may breach the terms, which risks losing the account entirely.
• Your private life is visible to customers.

The fifth is the one that ends badly. Most platforms require commercial activity to run through a page, and enforcement is unpredictable but real.

Losing a personal account takes the business presence and the family photographs at the same time.

The transfer problem

Worth understanding early, because it becomes expensive late.

A personal profile belongs to a person and cannot be handed over.

Which means the business audience is not a business asset. It cannot be sold, passed to a partner, or delegated to somebody else.

For a sole trader who will retire rather than sell, that may not matter.

For anybody who might sell the business, take on a partner, or hire somebody to handle enquiries, it matters considerably, and it is not fixable retrospectively.

A worked example

A trade business run for years from the owner's personal account, with a large local following.

When they took on a second person, that person could not answer messages, because doing so meant giving access to a personal account.

Enquiries arriving through the platform were answered only when the owner had time, which was frequently evenings, and several went cold.

They created a page and ran both in parallel for six months, posting to the page and sharing each post from the personal account.

The page reached a workable following, the second person could handle messages, and the personal account went back to being personal.

The overlap period was the part that made it work, and skipping it is why most attempted moves fail.

Moving across

The practical sequence, which takes a few months and very little effort.

Create the page and complete it properly: details, hours, service area, photographs.

Post to the page, then share each post from the personal profile, so the existing audience sees it and learns the page exists.

Say plainly, once, that business posts are moving and where to find them.

Continue for a few months, then reduce the sharing gradually.

What does not work is announcing the page once and expecting people to follow it, since almost nobody does anything on a single request.

The counter-case

Where a personal profile is genuinely appropriate.

A sole trader whose work comes entirely from personal relationships, where the person is the business and separating them removes the point.

Anybody posting occasionally about work among ordinary personal content, without soliciting business, which is a different activity from running a business account.

And a business too small for the transfer or delegation problems to arise, where the honest assessment is that this will never be an asset anybody else uses.

Even then, the terms question applies, and it is worth understanding what the platform actually permits.

What a page gives you that a profile does not

Worth listing, since the case is usually made negatively.

Statistics showing what reached people and what did not, which is the only way to learn what works.

The ability to advertise, including boosting a post to a local area.

Fields for hours, service area, address and category, which appear in search and help people decide.

Multiple people able to manage it, at different permission levels, without sharing a password.

And reviews or recommendations in some cases, which accumulate as an asset.

None of those exists on a personal profile, and several of them are the reason to have a presence at all.

Local groups

Where the personal account keeps a genuine role, and it is worth being clear about.

Neighbourhood groups where recommendations are requested and given are usually joined by people rather than pages.

Which means participating there happens through a personal profile, and that is legitimate and frequently the most productive social activity available to a local trade.

The distinction: participating as a person who is a local tradesperson, answering questions and being recommended, rather than posting advertisements.

Most groups have rules about promotion, and the ones who get work from them are the ones being helpful rather than the ones posting offers.

Access and who holds it

Worth setting up correctly at the start, since it is difficult to correct later.

A page should have more than one administrator, so that losing access to one account does not lose the page.

Which happens: an account is compromised, a phone is lost, or the only person with access leaves the business.

A page with a single administrator whose account becomes unusable is frequently unrecoverable, and support processes for this are slow and uncertain.

Two administrators, one of whom is the owner, is the minimum sensible arrangement.

And where a supplier is given access, it should be at a level allowing them to post rather than to remove other administrators.

Keeping them separate afterwards

The habit that makes the arrangement work.

Business enquiries answered on the page, personal messages on the profile.

Business photographs on the page, family photographs on the profile.

Which requires a little discipline and it means customers do not see your holiday and your friends do not see your invoicing.

It also means that if you ever hand the business over, the handover is a page transfer rather than a conversation about what to do with an account containing a decade of your life.

Setting it up

1. Create a page and complete every field.
2. Add hours, service area and a real address or town.
3. Post to the page, share from the profile.
4. Say once that business posts are moving.
5. Run both for a few months.
6. Keep participating in local groups as yourself.

The sixth is the part people drop unnecessarily, since the page and the local group participation do different jobs and both are worth having.

Which platform this should be on is covered in being on one network rather than five.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.