Are you making a HUGE FACEBOOK MISTAKE that can cost your business BIG TIME?

Recently I've seen a lot of people setting up a second Facebook profile to use as a "business" or "professional" profile so that they can keep their personal one for connecting with friends and family, and their professional profile for business and career use. On the surface, this makes some sense, especially for people that like the way LinkedIn provides a professional presence on one of the top social networking sites. And people want to extend that logic to where many of their current connections are - on Facebook. But... If you are using or thinking about setting up a Facebook profile as a professional page, you might want to consider setting up a Fan Page instead, for several reasons. Facebook Fan Pages, also knows as Business Pages, have several advantages over creating a second Facebook personal profile for your business. Not that I am the "Facebook Police" by any means, but setting up a personal profile is against the Facebook Terms of Service. I bring this up not because I think we all should abide just as Facebook would want us to, but because Facebook does reserve the right to close your account if you violate their Terms. And I would hate to see anyone slip by for years, build a fantastic business profile and make awesome connections just to have to all deleted out of the blue one day. I know how I would feel, so I don't want to see it happen to anyone else, either. Top Ten Reasons a Fan Page is Better for Business Aside from the above, here are ten reasons a Fan Page is better suited to your professional networking on Facebook and will get your much better bottom-line business results than a personal profile: 1.) Facebook Fan Pages are indexed by search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing, and will show in search results, sending more visitors to your Fan Page that are looking for just what you provide. 2.) Being listed on the main search engines will boost your own website rankings when your website URL is listed on your Fan Page (ALWAYS list your website link on all your social networking profiles! :) ) 3.) Fan Pages can have unlimited connections ("Likes"/friends), as opposed to a Facebook personal profile, which only can have up to 5,000 friends. 4.) You can set up custom webpage interactive "tabs" and landing pages on your Fan Page, which can attract more "Likes" as well as get more people over to your own website. 5.) You can send Facebook "email" updates to all your Fans at once - and your Fans then become an off-shoot of your email distribution list. 6.) Due to the most recent Facebook Fan Page "upgrade" (it's called an "upgrade" even through it's fr.ee), you now can interact with other Fan Pages on Facebook while posting as your Fan Page instead of your personal profile, which helps attract new Fans and further extends the reach of your marketing message and your networking. 7.) Facebook Ads are still a relatively cheap form of marketing and can be a good source of traffic to your Fan Page - or an exte al website. 8.) You can set up a direct feed from your Fan Page posts to your Twitter account. As a second step, you can set up your LinkedIn account to pull updates from Twitter, thereby creating a technological synergy and multiple outlets for your messages, reaching more of your network on the platform that they prefer and use more often. 9.) Having a Fan Page will quickly give your visitors a much better understanding of your business and the type of support, ideas, products or services you provide, making their decision to connect much easier. On a personal profile, visitors usually need to hunt for information to figure out who you are and why they should connect - and often times cannot find those pieces of information at all. 10.) Having a Facebook business presence is part of your overall marketing system and client funnel. Facebook Fan Pages are built with business growth and marketing in mind whereas personal profiles are not. There are other advantages as well, but I find these are the Top Ten for most small business owners. Please let me know if I can answer anything specific regarding these ideas, or post some of your own experiences and suggestions in the Comments Section. To your success, "BizCoach" Jason Rosado