I don’t accept businesses as friends on Facebook. In my life I don’t have businesses as friends so I won’t accept you as a friend online. Somehow it seems a little to personal to open up my whole wall, pictures, and everything else to a business that most of the time doesn’t even identify a person. Call me crazy but I think it should be up to me to go find a business that I like and “like” them on Facebook. That’s what they’re there for.

I know. You were an early adopter and now you have 4,000 friends for your business and you think you would lose so much converting to a fan page. No. Look at the quality of those friends. Are they really fans of your business or are they just friends because they, like you, feel good about having 4,000 friends? When you have a fan page, you’re more likely to build a following of people that actually like your business and want to be a part of it. It will be your existing customers, potential customers, and people who generally want to hear what you have to say.

Don’t worry. You can still pretty much do the same thing with a fan page now that you can do with a profile. You can post on other pages you like and interact with other businesses. You can reply to people’s posts on your wall and interact with them. You just can’t see personal information.

Try it out. Running a profile as a business is against Facebook TOS so you may just get shut down at some point anyway. You might as well make the switch and have something up and running before that happens. If not, please don’t friend request me.

Jared