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Some Facebook Page Owners Facing Woes

People who created and administer Facebook (Fan/Business) Pages from Facebook business accounts (as opposed to personal user profiles) may be having some woes with the new interface for Facebook Pages.

Today a client reported being unable to add any content to the Facebook Page she administers when logged in as the business account that originally created the Page. In fact, none of the features and links that used to be available to her on her Facebook Page were available after her Page was upgraded to the new interface.

We solved her problem by having her log out of Facebook from her business account and log back in using her personal user profile.

Whether this problem is a temporary glitch is unknown.

But it does beg the question (yet again) of why one would use a business account to manage his or her Pages and ad campaigns rather than a personal user profile. After all, Facebook business accounts are significantly limited entities (described here in Facebook's Help Center).

When I ask people why they chose to join Facebook with business accounts instead of personal user accounts, the most common answer sounds something like this:

I don't want to be besieged by friend requests (or to hurt people's feeling by declining same), and I have no intention of using Facebook as a tool for connecting with people personally.

Ok, I get it.

But I'd like to offer a couple of rebuttal arguments.

A) Facebook's privacy settings - though they're not perfect and they change too darn frequently - nowadays allow a personal user to become almost invisible.

If you want, you can ignore any friend requests that your privacy settings allow. Better still, reply to them by copying and pasting a cordial little spiel that says something like, "Thanks so much for wanting to connect with me on Facebook! Won't you Like my Business Page?"

B) If you don't have a personal Facebook account, you can't follow other Facebook pages and read their news in your news feed.

Why does this matter? Because (IMHO), the best way to learn how to be an effective provider of potentially useful information through Facebook is to be at least an occasional consumer of potentially useful information on Facebook.

(Ironically, although a link to this blog entry will be added to nSiteful's Facebook Page, Facebook business account members won't see it in their news feeds because they don't have news feeds and they can't follow us on Facebook!)