Valeo Marketing

Drawbacks and Pitfalls of the Facebook Migration Tool

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Facebook marketing is a new animal, and as such, there were many businesses who simply didn’t know how to get started with marketing on this social network of choice. As a result, many of you created a personal Facebook Profile for your business, instead of a Page.

Facebook Migration Tool to turn profiles into pages.

This is incredibly common, and now many businesses who want to use the superior Facebook Page have gone through the frustrating process of suggesting that your friends on the personal Profile “like” your Page. The conversion rate for this process is generally quite low – you’re never going to get even half of your friends to like your Page. Using a personal profile as a brand is actually a violation of Facebook’s terms of service (TOS), and by doing so, you run the risk of Facebook pulling out the big stick and revoking your access. So what do you do?

Now, you can take the business profile and use the Profile Migration tool to set up an official Brand page. Brand pages are better suited for local marketing because they allow anyone to “like” you (no approving friends), all of your current friends will be switched over to fans, there’s no maximum on how popular you can get, and they offer small businesses more robust media and promotion offerings. The fact is, Brand pages are simply the better option. By not using them and sticking to a personal profile, you limit your brand’s ability to really reach out and engage customers.

However, there are some unexpected results that inhibit the functionality of this application.

  • It will create a new Page from your personal profile. You do NOT get the option to move your friends over to a pre-existing Fan page.
  • The name of your profile will likely be the name of the new Fan page. Changing the name of your profile is also problematic, because Facebook doesn’t allow you to use anything but a “real person” name. And since you can only change the name of a Fan page with less than 100 friends, that’s going to be a major issue for many.

The process is relatively new and some minor hiccups are being worked out, but you can be assured we are staying on top off the progress and will be ready and available for you to make a smooth transition and have all the offerings and benefits the brand page has to offer.