What You MUST KNOW When You Convert Your FB Profile to a Page>>>Be Extremely Careful

 by Michael Brandvold

Facebook recently announced a feature that allows you to convert a Personal Profile to a Business Page. I recently reported on this, stating it is big news. I still feel this is big. It is a long overdue tool. BUT…

Make sure you read all of the documentation supporting how to convert a Facebook Profile to a Page and understand completely what will happen before you make a conversion.

Some of the key points I think you need to aware of:

1. Once converted your Personal Profile is gone. Anything and everything that profile was associated with; groups, pages, apps, is also gone. Meaning if you were a admin on a Page, not anymore. If you were playing a game, not anymore. Links to your profile will not redirect to the new page. It is as if that profile never existed.

2, Profile content – all the content on your profile is gone. Let me repeat that… all your profile content is gone. Facebook does allow you to make a backup of your profile, which I suggest doing. But, the conversion will not move your content over. Photos are gone, Notes are gone, Wall posts are gone. All comments left by friends are gone, and all comments you left are also gone.  Let me repeat again, it is as if this profile never existed. All traces are removed.

3. If you already have a Page this new Page will not be merged with the existing  Page and there is no way to merge Pages. So you could end up with two Pages that you then need to manually merge and move fans.

4. Your Profile’s custom username/url – gone.

5. All your messages disappear. Make sure you have copied any important info from messages you might need.

So why would anyone want to do this? Here is one example where I could see it being useful.

You have a real Personal Profile, but you also created a Profile for your band. That band Profile is maxed out at 5000 friends, or fast approaching that limit. Of course you can’t install apps on a Profile so you are also missing out on many engagement and marketing tools. You have been thinking about, or are in the process of, trying to move the friends from the band Profile to a band Page. Lots of work to do that, it sure would be nice if Facebook gave us a couple tools to help. Anyway, after looking at what might be lost by converting the Profile to a Page you decide to make the move. Now you have a new, although empty, band Page with 5000 fans. Taking all the data you downloaded from the profile you can now begin the manual process of posting photos, entering notes, making wall posts.

If you had a bunch of pending friend requests you should send them all message in advance that you a launching a new Page. I don’t have confirmation on what happens to pending requests, but based upon all other actions I would suspect they are lost and not automatically converted to Likes.

Take moment to read this post on Mashable, it goes into what you can expect, along with some personal experiences with the process.

Please make sure you clearly understand what will happen as a result of converting your Facebook Profile to a Page. For some this could be a excellent tool, for others it might be a nightmare.

If you have any experience with converting a Profile to a Page you would like to share, please leave a comment.

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