FaceBook Basics

2.9K followers

Updated 7 years ago

There have been a lot of FaceBook questions and a common thread is knowing: What is a Profile? What is a Group? What is a Page?

FaceBook Profile:

A Face book Profile is "personal", as in it is for a person. FaceBook requires that the Profile is only for a person (therefore a business cannot have a profile) and a person may only have one profile.

FaceBook Profiles have "Friends" .. these are people you know (family, friends, acquaintances) but should not be "randoms".

Your posts on your profile can be business oriented but be careful. Your Friends accepted/added you because of their personal relationship with you, not your business and they are not there to hear about your business.

A possible guideline is: If your Profile is for family/personal audience then keep your business away from it. If your Profile is a little business oriented (as mine is), then you could do lifestyle stuff (Eg mid week pic playing golf with text "My income is on automatic pilot" .. you are looking for a friend to say "How?"). Your Friends don’t want to hear you "vomit" you business over them, it is not why they are Friends on your Profile.

FaceBook Groups

FaceBook Groups are for people with a common interest (niche?).

You may create a Group or join a Group and you do this from your Profile. You can create or join multiple Groups .. up to 6000.

The easiest way to look at Groups is through examples:

You maybe be quilter and you know or occasionally get together with local quilters so you create a local quilter Facebook Group in which you share quilting with each other.
And/Or you join or create a State or National or International Quilters Group
If you have a business providing quilting supplies you may decide to create a quilting Group. Posts you make to this Group need to be primarily about quilting not about your business or you will loose people from the Group. You do occasional business posts .. Eg do a mini product review and direct to your webpage for more.

A Group is more successful if it has a high feel of "community" and you focus on Posts that provide value, that get reactions, comments and open up interaction and discussion.

Given that a Group is a Community of people with common interest .. in this case quilters .. there is no point in putting up Posts about fishing. So if you have a quilting supply business and a fishing supply business you would not have these on the same Group .. unless your Group was only for people that like both quilting and fishing .. which is not likely!

Facebook Pages ("Like" "Fan")

I like to think of a Page as an alternative WebSite.

Facebook Pages are for: Businesses/Brands/Products/Artists/Public Figures etc.

You may create a Page or Like a Page and you do this from your Profile. You can create as many Pages as you wish.

You can “Promote” a Page (ie pay FaceBook to offer your Page as something of interest to other FaceBook Members) or “Boost” a Post that is on the FaceBook Page (ie pay FaceBook to offer your Post as something of interest to other FaceBook Members). Note: Promoting and Boosting are different from Facebook Advertisements. Posts on Pages can be Boosted, Posts on Groups cannot.

New Posts also go out to people that have Liked the Page before (the "how" of this and Facebook's algorithm is another story).

You want to get interaction on your Page (Facebook have a term "engagement") and it is generally harder to do than in a Group. Just like a WebSite, the content of your Posts is critical. My Facebook Page has high engagement (which Facebook likes therefore I get better outcomes from Facebook's algorithms) because of my Post content and how the Post and the sales funnel creates "engagement". (But again, that is another story.)

As a personal observation: a Like Page is long term project, it requires significant effort to be of value.

Now, let us go back to our quilting. If a Page is like a WebSite .. in this case quilters .. there is no point in putting post about fishing. So if you have a quilting supply business and a fishing supply business you would not have these on the same Page (Website) .. you would need 2 Pages.