Lollipop Local

Here are Facebook’s official instructions on how to change a Facebook Personal Profile to a Business Page without losing your friends/fans in March 2013. Click on this link to follow Facebook’s instructions but we are putting together a simplified step by step guide using our own experiences.

If at first you don’t succeed, keep on trying! Jim at Montanatan.co.u was getting the message “An error has occurred while merging pages. This may be caused by your attempt to merge too many pages.”

He commented below asking for our help and we suggested that he keep trying at various times of day – especially when Facebook were likely to be less busy in the small hours. He followed through on this advice and has finally managed to convert a personal profile into a proper business Page.

So, why would people need to know how to convert their Facebook Profile to a Page?  Here’s a guest post from Shawn Abel, who has done it since the new Timeline changes and Facebook seem to have made the process a little less complicated than it was previously.

Well, as Facebook continues to constantly change, people tend to go with what they know.  We all have it, use it and find comfort in understanding it. “It” is  our Facebook profiles/Timelines.  So it really isn’t surprising when a “business” decides to get their name out there and makes the mistake of creating a profile/Timeline to do business on Facebook.

We have all come across profiles/Timelines that are businesses; we even have allowed them to “friend” us, however, this is completely against Facebook’s TOS.

You CANNOT have a profile/Timeline for your Business, end of story, period (unless you are a person that is a brand)!

And I am sure many are saying, “Well, I didn’t know and I already have a profile (Timeline) that has 2000+ friends that I don’t want to lose!”  You can now have your theoretical “cake” and “eat” it too!  Facebook has made it quite painless to do a conversion and I highly recommend taking the steps below before Facebook takes matters into their own hands and removes your business profile/Timeline.

Convert Facebook Profile to Page

The very first thing you need to do is back up your profile/Timeline.  You can find that feature under “General Account Settings”, under the drop down, on the blue bar (by your name), click on “Account Settings”.

When you click on “Download a copy” Facebook will give you this screen

You will want to “Start my archive”.   And you will see the following 3 screens ~

You will then receive an email (the one that is your primary for FB) telling you your download is complete.  You will want to visit this page again and download your data.

Take a look at each folder and make sure all the pictures you want to have and any other information from your profile that you want is downloaded to your computer.

Once you have made the conversion you can’t go back.

Back up, back up, back up either with this feature or manually, I cannot stress this enough.

Now that you have your data backed up you can start the conversion process.  You will want to visit this link about how to convert Facebook profile to Page

Once you click on the “click here” you will be taken to the page below.  You also need to tell FB what kind of business you are, so that you are categorized correctly.

Please read the statement in yellow “NO OTHER CONTENT WILL BE MOVED”.  You need to double and triple check that you have a good back up.

After converting you will have the new business Timeline.   You don’t have a choice, FB will automatically convert to the new layout and remember it is “live”.

I did this for a client this past weekend and would like to show you the screen shots of how things ended up looking.  There are few changes to a regular page when you do a conversion.  The user name and password are still the same, however you now log in to a page that looks like this.  Please look at the screen shot below and note that there is only “settings” and “logout”.  The “manage” feature will be the same as on other pages.

Here is an example of a regular page -  note the differences in the blue bar.  My name is visible; I have the “home” key and the drop down arrow.  A converted page does not have the ability to toggle.  I also have the option to convert my page to the new Timeline layout.

With the conversion of the profile to a page, I was able to save all of the 2000+ fans (which was very important to the client).

The next step is to now merge this new Business Page with a Places Page  that had been created last fall.  We had tried with lackluster success to post status updates on the Wall asking those friends to move to the new “page”.

I even tried creating an “event” telling those “friends” to please move to the page, out of the 2000+ friends only 100 moved over, it was quite dismal.  Converting was our only option.

I had been holding out making this conversion for fear of losing the “friends” they had accumulated.  My hesitancy was due to trying to convert a Facebook profile to a business Page last fall and the conversion ending up not being quite as successful as this one. I can now say with confidence that this is the best time to make the conversion.

You want to do this before FB decides to do it for you!

I hope you find this information helpful and that you take on the task of getting your business profile converted to an actual page, the benefits of a page are incredible!  It will also help people find you!

I will write next about how to merge the Facebook Places and the Business Page together.  You are not quite finished but in much better shape than you were before!

Thank you Lollipop Local for allowing me the opportunity to guest blog.  I had a blast!

Shawn Abel, Owner of InteractABEL Social Media.

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This entry was posted on Monday, March 12th, 2012 at 11:37 pm and is filed under Facebook. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.