Facebook Fan Page or Profile?

Posted January 15th, 2010

Facebook

I can’t figure this one out.

I’ve got a Facebook profile with about 660 friends on it. Those friends are a mixture of “real” friends, people who’ve seen me give a presentationfanpage.jpg, heard me on the radio, or just randomly shown up.

I’ve also got a Facebook fan page with a few dozen people on it.

The fan page, of course, has better marketing tools (tabs that let people sign up to my newsletter, ability to send an email to all fans, and so on), so lately I’ve been hiding my “real” profile from searches, hoping people will join the fan page instead.

I don’t know. It just seems so.. so… unCanadian.

Are you an independent professional in the same boat? What do you do? Do you let anyone friend your personal Facebook profile or direct them to a fan page?

UPDATE: Darren’s right. I’ve deleted my fan club, and now I’ll just use my regular profile for everything and use Friend Splitting to manage my Facebook lists.

  • Personally, I'm not super comfortable with people becoming 'fans' of me. If I were more of an artist, who was working professionally and regularly producing artistic works, then I might be more at ease with that kind of articulated relationship. I'm okay with them being fans of my projects, but not fans of me per se. Your mileage, of course, will vary.

    Incidentally (and ironically), speaking of projects, we didn't even bother putting up a Facebook page for our book. I just thought the minor benefits didn't outweigh the effort of maintaining the page, and the chance that I'd be flogging our book to friends and supporters who'd already heard about it in three or four other ways.

    On the other hand, I'm kind of haphazard about who I 'friend' on Facebook. Happily it doesn't have to be quite so literal on Twitter.
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