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Good News! You Can Now Convert Your Facebook Personal Profile Into a Business Page

by Terry Crosby on March 31, 2011

Facebook just released the Personal Page Migration Tool which allows users to convert their Personal Profile into a Business Page. Your Facebook friends would turn into your fans (or “likers”).

You should consider converting your Facebook Personal Profile into a Business Page if you. . .

mistakenly set up your business on the Personal Profile. (Using a personal profile for business is a violation of Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. If you don’t convert your profile to a Page, you risk permanently losing access to the profile and all of your content. )
are using your Personal Profile to promote your business and have hit the 5000 friend limit. Business Pages allow an unlimited number of fans (or “likers”) and Pages offer more robust features for organizations, businesses, brands, and public figures, which you can learn more about here.
would like your business to get found by your target audience. Pages and posts from Pages are being indexed by search engines which helps increase the likelihood of your business appearing in search engine results. Facebook Personal Profile posts are not indexed by the search engines.

How do I convert my Personal Profile into a Business Page?

Facebook has added a new Help Center article on migrating profiles to Pages with details about the migration process. Any user with a verified account can use the migration tool.

What you need to know before you convert your Personal Profile into a Business Page. . .

Only your profile photo and friends will be transferred to your new Business Page. All other profile content, including additional photos and wall posts will disappear and all Like connections to other Pages will be severed. Therefore, prior to converting you must use Facebook’s Download Your Information tool to back up your content.
There is no way to convert a Page to a user profile.
Users with less than 100 friends can rename their new Page during the migration process, but those with more than 100 friends must use their profile name.
Your friends turn into your fans (or “likers”).
You won’t be able to write on the walls of friends or see their updates in the news feed once you become a Page.

I would love to hear from you. Will you be converting your Personal Profile into a Business Page? What are your questions about whether or not to convert?

UPDATE: You may be able to reverse that conversion by filing a Profile To Business Page Migration Appeal with Facebook.

Tagged as: convert your facebook personal page into a business page

http://increasingworkplaceproductivity.net Bojan Djordjevic

Awesome! I am already recommending this to one of my clients!
http://terrycrosbyblog.com/ Terry Crosby

It is definitely a great solution for many.
Timothy Kendrick

Thank you!!!!!!! awesome

Timothy Kendrick
http://terrycrosbyblog.com/ Terry Crosby

You are welcome Timothy !
http://www.laurenhuston.com Lauren Huston

This is great, Terry! I know so many people who started personal pages for businesses. I’m going to use this as a reference for them! Thanks.
http://terrycrosbyblog.com/ Terry Crosby

Thank you Lauren
http://www.meetusinghal.com/ Meetu Singhal

Thank you , Terry! this post is just in tome for my Son’s school. After reading your post I think they would prefer to switch. As it is they are a business and not a person so I will recommend them to move ASAP.
http://terrycrosbyblog.com/ Terry Crosby

I agree Meetu. Make sure they back up their data first.
http://www.meetusinghal.com/ Meetu Singhal

I will be doing it for them Terry so I will do the needful. Thanks again! very helpful .
http://chrisrecord.com Chris Record

It’s very tempting to convert, and then start up a new Facebook personal profile and hand pick selected friends to interact with very privately.

However, the ability to share content using your Facebook Fan page is much more difficult. For example, the “like” buttons on websites only work with personal profiles and not with pages.

I am on the fence about switching things up. Plus, it’s also tough because I already have a Facebook fan page with over 6,000 fans and a personal profile with 5,000 friends. So if I switched I would have two separate Pages promoting myself. I like the SEO aspects, but no totally sure about the switch yet.

I would say I am about 70/30 in favor of changing the profile to a public page.

Terry, do you have any suggestion as to what someone in my position should do?
http://www.monetizeyourniche.com Jim Alvino

Great information, Terry, thank you! Question: My account on Facebook is a personal account, but I also have a group called Monetize Your Niche (suprise surprise). Do the new rules/options affect groups in any way? Thanks.
http://terrycrosbyblog.com/ Terry Crosby

Chris, I was going to tell you that you don’t need to make this decision because Facebook disabled the migration tool yesterday but I just checked and it looks like it is enabled again.

It is too bad they won’t let you migrate your personal profile into an already existing business page. Since you primarily use your personal page for business I would be tempted to migrate, however, be sure you download all of your information because they only migrate your friends and profile photo.

Let me know what you decide. Remember it is a permanent decision.
http://terrycrosbyblog.com/ Terry Crosby

No, Jim, this migration tool only allows us to convert our personal page into a business page.
Deb

If you convert your personal page to a business page you said that you can not write on friends walls or see updated news is that correct? Then how do you communicate with your friends after the conversion?

Also can one person have two business pages? I work full time and handle the FB page for work, but I also do a side business on my own.

If you can help with this question I would greatly appreciate.

Deb
http://terrycrosbyblog.com/ Terry Crosby

Deb, your friends turn into your “likers” (fans) after conversion. They only way you can communicate with them is by updating them as the fan page. When you to to check you messages you will notice a link below the messages that says updates. Those updates are from business pages you have liked.

You can have as many business pages as you like.
http://terrycrosbyblog.com/facebooktutorials/reverse-your-facebook-personal-profile-to-business-page-conversion/ Reverse Your Facebook Personal Profile To Business Page Conversion | Terry Crosby, Social Media Strategist & Trainer

[...] by Terry Crosby on April 6, 2011 // Do you regret converting your Facebook Personal Profile to a Business Page? [...]
http://blog.jippidy.com/ Julian

I’m hoping someone here knows the answer – once you convert that personal profile, how do you login to edit the newly converted Fan Page? The login credentials for your prior personal profile no longer access your Fan Page. And if you have not assigned additional admins to this newly converted Fan Page, the one account that should be associated with it (your old personal profile) no longer exists. So you’re left in Facebook purgatory:-/ Any idea how to access this new Fan Page without any admins assigned?
http://terrycrosbyblog.com/ Terry Crosby

You access your page by logging into your personal profile. It did take a day or so for the fan page to get out of Facebook purgatory but I am now an admin. When did you migrate?
http://blog.jippidy.com/ Julian

Many thanks for the response, Terry! I just converted now, so I’m hopeful there’s just a delay. I started panicking out of frustration, since I had read some horror stories from other page owners. I guess I’ll just be patient and wait with crossed fingers for now=)
http://terrycrosbyblog.com/ Terry Crosby

Julian, Facebook needs to fix this or stop offering this service. It is very stressful to wait.
http://www.ncsmallbusinesstraining.com/why-you-cannot-use-a-facebook-personal-profile-as-a-business-page/ Why you cannot use a facebook personal profile as a business page. | NC Small Business Training

[...] me here from you? What have you learned? – Martin Brossman NCSmallBusinessTraining.com Here is my FB business profile if you liked this than please ‘like’ my page: [...]
carol

Hi terry,
I have a profile page with 5000+ friends, and then started a fan page a few months ago (but only about 300+ have come over). Is there a way to convert the friends on the profile page to the existing fan page? Or does the conversion mean I end up with another new fan page? (Someone told me that there is a request that you can send FB to bring over friends to the existing fan page. have you heard of this?) thanks!
Strunka2001

After profile migration to the page i submitted appeal week ago and still no change….
Andreaken

Hi there, i have just converted my fb page into a fan page. But i have no ‘likes’ and I had 5000 friends. Can anybody help me with this?
Thanks
Andreaken

How long does it take for your friends to move to your business page??
shiry

hello terry
i would like to convert a fb profile to an already exited page, because i have a big issue of almost 1000 friend requests that i could not approve since i have already reached the 5000 limit. The thing is that i am afraid that all the friendship request that r waiting for my confirmation will be lost forever, if i do decide to convert.
a year ago i wrote personal messages to some saying that i have reached my limit of friends and offering them to join my fb page instead, but then fb blocked me for sending message to people who r not my friends. after mailing fb team they unblocked me.
it has been almost a year since than and i am afraid that doing it again is too risky so im looking for a way to figure out this problem.

do you have any solution to this issue of handling friend request after reaching the 500 limit or maybe converting the the personal profile to my page will do the trick?

thank you so much for your help if you can,
shiry
http://terrycrosbyblog.com/ Terry Crosby

You can only convert your personal profile into a NEW business page. They will not let you use an existing page. Unfortunately, you would lose the 1000 friend invites.

Do you already have an existing fan page? I would suggest using Facebook’s Ads and sponsored stories. You are able to hyper target who sees your ads. You can only target those that are friends of your current fans. You can also target by broad interests or precise interests.
shiry

Thank you Terry for replaying so quickly…

So opening a new page wont help me to address all those people who are waiting for me to confirm their friendship request .
what can i do in this case where fb is not giving me a way to approach the same people that asked me to be a friend? all i can do is just ignore them?
i do have an exiting page that i want to offer them to join instead my profile.
FB doesn’t make the distinguish between situation like this and any other user promoting his page by sending messages to people he doesn’t know.
this is very frustrating…

thank u again
I really appreciate your help,
shiry
Tiffanybucciarelli

Deb – if I have several pages under my personal page – will all of them be converted to into this new business page?
Madonna

hi,
please can u help me my friend’s account converted to a business page by mistake or something we don’t know how. And he hasn’t any relation with ad .
could u please help me ?
http://facebook.myeternalstarshipenterprise.com/using-facebook-for-business-tips-to-get-you-started/ Facebook Money Machine

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Scope

Hello Terry,

I have just converted my profile to a business one, to my knowledge, Business pages do not allow the ability to invite friends – in fact
business pages cannot maintain a friends list – they can only
maintain a
fan list. I was wondering how do we exactly invite these “fans” in.
JacobMandel

I changed my Dlux Printing page from a personal page into a local business page – very unhappy with the fact I can no longer like or even simply see what my fans are doing. I have no idea how this is supposed to be a social way to communicate as a business.
Kjacksonfitness

I already have a business page set up but want to get ride of my personal page. Can i transfer everything form my personal page to my buisness page???
Exnasxious

Please help I had converted my personal profile to business page and now nobody can find my page. I think only page admins or my fan can see the page but non-fan can’t reach the page. I have report the problem to facebook but no reply yet.
Harj

I have recently converted my profile to a page to turn my friends into likes for advertising purposes. However now i have set up a sponsored story to target the friends of likes however the targeted audience is only showing 20 people. I have over 700 likes. Please help as the only reason i converted to a page was for likes and so i could advertise to the people they are friends with. Please help
Gold4it

Hello,

I want to convert my Facebook profile to a “page” I already created some time ago, and I don’t want to lose the url of that “page.” Will I lose it during the migration process?

Thank you!
Anonymous

Hm, i have created a page on facebook (community to be exact), i need to add app to that page, but only a proflie can create apps, so, how can i connect that page to belong to some facebook profile?
Since that app will be set for a profile and not a page, how can i add a app for page?