If you’ve mistakenly created a personal profile for your business or organization on Facebook, rather than a “page”, you’re not alone. Whether you did this unintentionally because you simply didn’t know that there was a different process for “pages” or you just thought it would be easier to create a profile initially, Facebook now allows you to convert your profile to a page. The feature has actually been available since last year, but like most “fixes” on Facebook, we’ve seen varied levels of success. Only recently has the Facebook profile to page conversion process seemed to work consistently and successfully for us though, and it’s about time given that it’s against FB’s own policies to use a profile for anything other than an individual’s personal account:
Maintaining a personal account for anything other than an individual person is a violation of Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. If you don’t convert your noncompliant account to a Page, you risk permanently losing access to the account and all of its content.
Despite how dire that warning might sound, we’ve never actually seen anyone permanently lose access to an account, and in fact we are aware of personal accounts that have been used as business pages for several years and are active as I write this post. Still, it offers no benefit to keep a “profile” when you can now just convert to a page. Having a “profile” is also rather odd from a usability standpoint because users don’t have the ability to “Like” it, but instead are forced to send your business a “Friend Request” if they want to connect. However you found yourself in this situation, we’d like to help you convert your profile today.
The best part about converting a Facebook profile to a page is that all of your page’s “friends” will automatically become people who “like” your page. Your profile picture will be carried over during the conversion as well. Unfortunately, these are the only items that will be carried over. No wall posts, messages or other photos will be carried over so it’s important that you download a backup of all of your Facebook information. We discussed this process in yesterday’s detailed post:
Download Your Information on Facebook – Another Social Media How-to
As we explained in that post, Facebook hasn’t yet built in functionality that allows you to import this archived data after the conversion so getting all of your data (wall posts, photos, etc.) back online can be time consuming, depending on how much there is. The good news is that the new Facebook Timeline Pages for Business allow you to pre-date posts you write for your own wall, so you can at least manually enter past posts so you don’t have to start managing your new page without any content.
NOTE - Facebook will use your username as your page’s URL:
When you convert your personal account to a Facebook Page, we’ll transfer your current profile picture and add all your friends and subscribers as people who like your Page. We’ll also make your account’s username the Facebook web address for your Page.
When you begin to convert your profile you’ll first have to pick the type of page you intend to create:
There are quite a number of sub-category options after you’ve selected one of those 6 main categories so you’ll need to choose what’s most appropriate for your business organization. After selecting your categories you’ll need to fill out the company name. Unfortunately this can be a bit problematic because you’ll obviously want to type your business’ name, but Facebook will return an error if the business name doesn’t closely match your “profile” name. This was the case for the Boys & Girls Club of Burlington, who we mentioned yesterday has allowed us to use their Facebook account/pages as examples for this series of blog post series:
Essentially the issue is that the personal profile was created as if it was for a persona named “BGC Burlington” (as in, first name BGC, last name Burlington). When converting to a page, Facebook sees that “Boys & Girls Club of Burlington” is significantly different. This error prevents the conversion. You simply can’t convert a profile to a Facebook page unless the new “page name” closely matches the name used on the profile. While the page name is generally what becomes your page’s customer URL (see: Facebook Page URL – Vanity Username/Web Address for Your Business Page), it may be possible to change the page name and URL separately later on. There are however a number of variables that will impact what you’re able to do, so we’ll need to address these issues in future posts. The key again during the conversion phase is that you must closely match your page “name” to the profile name. Once you’ve done this correctly, you’ll just need to confirm that you’d like to convert your profile by entering your password:
Once your conversion is complete, you’ll still be able to use the same login information, which is somewhat unusual given that Facebook normally doesn’t let you create a “page” without a “profile” to manage it. As someone here in the office noted, we may have just figured out a work-around for this issue that has bothered a lot of our clients in recent years – they want a FB page for their business, but they don’t want to have to create personal accounts. Either way, it’s still best that you do grant administrative permissions for at least one other human “profile” user. You can do this by clicking the “manage” drop-down at the top of your new page, and then “edit page”. On the next screen you’ll select “Manage Admins” from the menu on the left side of the screen:
You’ll enter the Facebook email addresses of people you’d like to grant administrative access to here. As recently as about a year ago, you could only add “friends” as admins, but for a while now you’ve been able to add anyone who “likes” your page. This is important for a newly converted page because all friends will have been converted to “likes” anyway. Normally when you’re managing admins you can start typing the names of friends and Facebook will auto-fill with similar name options, but you won’t see people who only “like” the page. For these you have to type their exact email address. If you try to enter the email address of someone who doesn’t like the page, you’ll trigger the following error:
As we wrap up this “how to” on converting your Facebook profiles to pages, let’s take a look at a couple of before/after screenshots to see a visual representation of the impacts this migration will have. Before converting, your “profile” was a person in Facebook’s eyes, so the first page you saw when logging in was the standard news feed:
Once your profile is converted, you’ll no longer see this screen if you continue to use the old login. You’ll just see a list of the pages you admin. Of course if you gave admin access to the new page to another personal Facebook account you already had, you will still see your news feed when logging in to that account. Now, take a look at what the previous timeline view of your profile looked like before the conversion:
And compare that with how your “Facebook Page” timeline looks after the conversion:
The most obvious difference is likely the missing “cover photo”, but this is only missing because it hasn’t been added to the new page yet. As we mentioned above, only the “profile” image and friends (turned “likes”) are retained in the conversion. You have to add back in all other photos, including cover images. So, setting aside the fact that the “page” just hasn’t been updated with the cover photo yet, look at some of the other key differences. Chief among them, the “Admin Panel” which includes sections for notifications (about activity on the page), messages, new “likes”, Insights (more information about page interaction), and page tips. You’ll also see that the rectangle previously labeled “Friends” has changed to “Likes”.
We hope this tutorial has been helpful for those who are in the process of trying to convert a profile to a page on Facebook, but as we’ve discovered every time we’ve been involved in this transition, there are always unforeseen issues that can arise – so let us know if you need any help. In the case of the Boys & Girls Club, things were particularly complicated. Yesterday we explained the issues with working with downloaded data and in today’s post we talked about page name issues, but that wasn’t the half of it. In the case of B&G, they had built quite a following, with over 400 friends (now likes). At the same time they had at one point created a “page” to manage, using the same “profile” login. However this page was unpublished at some point, despite having nearly 200 “likes”. Ideally we’d obviously like to combine the 2 pages so we retain all “likes” and as much information as possible, while getting the best custom page name and URL. As we’ll explain in a future post about merging Facebook pages, this merge process is easier said than done.
Note: Some personal information from “Friends” is blacked out for privacy in some of the screenshots in this post.
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