Using Facebook pages professionally
A professional Facebook presence can involve separating client-facing material from private contacts or deliberately presenting a personal profile professionally. Pages and lay-reader feedback offer different ways to make writing visible and assess how it reaches its intended audience.
Personal and professional presence
One freelance writer treated Facebook as primarily a personal network but used her profile professionally, connecting with industry colleagues and sharing material similar to her LinkedIn profile. Her examples included sharing an EMWA webinar to show professional involvement; some attendees had learned of the event through EMWA's Facebook page.
A company-page example offered a different approach: presenting a business rather than a personal identity, with followers who did not need to become friends. The writer described pages using either a personal or brand name and suggested that a professional page could be less formal and reach beyond an immediate professional circle.
After an attendee reported being refused a second profile using the same name and birth date, the writer recommended a page linked to the personal profile. Her distinction was between publicly available page content and profile content restricted through privacy settings, while acknowledging that people could still connect the page with its owner's personal profile.
A 2010 recommendation favoured keeping personal connections on a profile and clients and business associates on a page, to avoid exposing clients to everything personal friends posted.
Reaching lay readers
Facebook can provide an audience for journalistic and health writing and a place to share blog material. Feedback from friends, family and other lay readers can reveal whether a complicated scientific topic has been explained accessibly, complementing feedback from professional peers on LinkedIn.
A study published in October 2009 compared referral sources and return visits across 33 million unique users in Chitika's publisher network during September 2009. Facebook supplied the highest number of repeat visitors, and 20% of visitors referred from Facebook returned to the referred site at least four times per week.
Page and profile comparison in 2010
Facebook Pages had launched in November 2007 as a way for businesses, brands, public figures and other organisations to establish a presence, alongside personal profiles. A 2010 comparison set out four differences.
| Feature in 2010 | Page | Personal profile |
|---|---|---|
| Visibility | Viewable without a Facebook account and indexable by search engines | Required a logged-in Facebook account |
| Connection approval | Anyone could become a fan without confirmation | Friend requests required confirmation |
| Audience size | Unlimited fans | A limit on friends |
| Targeted updates | Could send an update to all fans at once | No equivalent feature |
At that time, creating a page required a personal profile, and the page's name could not subsequently be changed; the advice was to choose the name people would search for. Page tools described in 2010 included Notes for blogging, video sharing and discussion boards for conversations about a business, its products and events.
Feed relevance
One writer demonstrated unfollowing a page or person to remove their posts from the feed while retaining the page like or personal connection.