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Migrate Your Business from a Profile to Page on Facebook

Facebook logoFacebook has very specific terms of service regarding how businesses interact on their platform. For instance, it’s required that businesses who want a presence on Facebook create a Facebook fan page (also called a business page). Unfortunately, not all businesses are aware of this rule and may have inadvertently created a Facebook profile for their business instead. To solve this problem, Facebook has created a new Profile to Business Page Migration Tool allows businesses to change their Facebook profile into a Facebook business page.

In general, once you’ve established a community around a specific profile, it’s difficult to move that community to a new page. Move them you must, though. Before the migration tool, you’d need to write several status updates asking your community to click over to the new page and Like it in order to continue to receive updates. You had to tell your community that the current profile would be deleted by a certain date and continue to remind them to click over and Like the new page. It was tedious for everyone involved and you invariably lost some of your community because they either didn’t see your updates or didn’t get around to Liking the new page. With the new Facebook Profile to Business Page Migration Tool you can avoid that hassle.

When you use the tool, Facebook takes your profile picture and moves it to a new business page and converts your “friends” into “Likes” on the new page. It’s important to note that Facebook doesn’t move any of your existing content (including status updates, photos, video, etc.) to the new page. If you don’t back that up before you migrate, you’ll lose it. To back up your information follow these instructions:

  1. Go to your Account Settings (the down arrow in the top right of any Facebook page).
  2. Click the Download a Copy link.
  3. Click the Download button on the next page.

After you’ve made a backup of your content, you can start the migration process by visiting https://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php?migrate and following the instructions.

A few reasons to migrate your business presence from a personal profile to a business page:

  • It’s against Facebook TOS to have a personal profile for a business, service, or product.
  • Profiles are limited to 5,000 friends; business pages can have unlimited fans.
  • Profiles require someone to request a friendship; pages can be Liked by anyone. That means less hassle for you because you don’t have to approve every fan.
  • Pages allow you to install applications fro added functionality. For instance, you can install a newsletter signup, create a custom Welcome tab, or install a contact form. You can even create an online store right on Facebook! Profiles can’t use those apps.

6 thoughts on “Migrate Your Business from a Profile to Page on Facebook”

  1. Great news in the article! In my case I have been encouraging migration for some time and now have a profile page with business name as well as a a fan page with business name that my personal name profile manages. Whew!

    Will I not be able to migrate because a fan page with same business name is already created?
    Any suggestions?

    Best regards,
    Stacy Rippy
    Diva Day OK

  2. What if you made the switch to a page before the migration assistant became available? We still have friends who haven’t made the switch to our new page – is there a way to use the migration assistant now for an existing profile –> page migration?

  3. I created an account, I addes some friend and when I tried to migrate they blocked my account. During migration they ask me to log in. I tried to log in and they blocked my account. I tried this in 5 different accounts. What it happening? Why doesn’t work the migration??

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