A Warning About Transferring Your Facebook Profile to a Fan Page

For those of us who use Facebook to Network with anyone and everyone you know that at some point you feel like you can no longer really share things on Facebook that you would like your friends to know or see. I know for me I have so many different groups on my Facebook profile that I feel weird sharing almost anything. I feel weird sharing too much about animal related things because I am worried one group really could care less, or anything even semi political or religious because I don’t want to turn anyone off who I might have met through networking and not school. Plus we all know the first cardinal rule of Social Media no politics or religion unless you work in either of these fields.

In fact I pretty much stopped posting there for several months which happened to be the same time that Facebook decided that it knows best who we want to be friends with and see status updates from. So even though it looks like I have a certain number of friends it is more like 10 who actually see my updates which really really stinks I know I am not alone and have even written a post about it there is little to anything I can do about it considering Facebook was how I keep tin touch with most of those people so its not like they were going to see the Blog Post about it because they don’t follow my blog and even if I share it on my Facebook page the only people who will see it are the ones who already see my status updates anyway.

This week Facebook has announced that you can now turn a Profile Page into a Fan Page and many people who have met their profile quota numbers and have people waiting for a friendship accept choose to take the plunge and make the switch. They did it for 2 reasons. One so they could actually share with their friends and family on Facebook and feel like they can connect with them. The second reason is so that everyone can follow them and see what is going on professionally without being on a quota waiting list.

Seems simple enough and like a great idea in theory at least especially with a page on Facebook called “Create a Page” that is supposed to help you seamlessly migrate from a conventional user account to a public figure or fan page.

In practice people who made the switch are regretting ever seeing the option pop up. You can see the Facebook horror story over on Mashable that one of their staff members is currently going through http://mashable.com/2011/03/31/facebook-profile-migration-warning/ that alone has completely made my mind up that I am going to leave things the way they are. The part that scares me the most is loosing all my connections from school because I know Facebook will tell me I can’t request certain friendships because they view it as spam and there is nothing you can do to prove to Facebook you actually know the people pretty well even if you don’t have their email addresses in your address book.

I was seriously considering making the switch for Davinia and Indiana’s profile but then I found this part out none of the third-party functionality (Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, RSS, and so on) has migrated from the user page to the fan page, and there is no information explaining how to reconnect these apps. Plus you loose the ability to be the administrator of the Page because the profile that was used to create the account is no longer valid because well you loose your url and have to choose a new one. Her is another Facebook Horror Story http://www.zeldman.com/2011/03/05/

Conclusion: Unless you have a best friend who works in the technical department of Facebook who is willing to help you unlock certain things I suggest (at least for now) not to switch your Profile Page to a Fan Page. In fact I even suggest that companies who the tool was made for not make the switch until the bugs have been ironed out or there will be IT / Social Media People / the Intern who will have to try and explain to the boss why they lost all capability to do anything with their Fans and would be best to start over.