Why You Should Use a Facebook Fan Page vs. Profile for a Brand

I’m working with a client where we’re launching a personal brand online. We’ve been discussing the advantages and disadvantages on how to use social media tools like Twitter and Facebook at various points on the project. Recently, we talked at length about a strategy for using a Facebook Fan Page. Talking with Manifest’s social media expert, Christine Mortensen, and our marketing expert, Jonas Paretzkin,  led us to the following simple points of why you should use a Facebook Fan page over a personal profile for any brand on Facebook…

Creating a Fan Page is a best practice as users will look for that first over a regular profile page

A Fan page adds credibility behind the brand, it appears more official/professional (credible)

Fan pages provide valuable reporting features or “insights” such as fan count, the number of interactions on your page each week, the demographics of your fans and more

Fans can easily interact with each other via wall posts, discussion boards, etc.

Fan pages provide an opportunity to create custom applications hosted on your fan page that visitors can interact with. This also creates an additional visiting attraction to the Fan page.

Having a fan page allows you to send messages to your entire FB fan base at one time

You can leverage your own personal profile page by sharing posts from the fan page (via the “share” button)

A Fan Page allows you to create the Fan Page box/widget for your site, that promotes all of the fan activity on the fan page itself (an example of what this looks like)

There’s much more to think about as well when considering the options – e.g., page administration, separation of truly personal information vs. general, publicly available information, etc.  – so don’t think of an end all, be all list. If you think of more, feel free to add it as a comment below.