How to Convert a Personal Facebook Page to a Business Fan Page

In a perceived effort from Facebook to better organize the social networking giant’s website, Facebook has released a tool that will allow you to convert a personal Facebook page to a Business Fan page for the purpose of marketing.  Plus, let’s face it, the easier to create or convert a personal Facebook page to a business Fan page, the more advertising revenue Facebook can create for itself.  Still, it is a good tool for people who have amassed a large amount of ‘Friends’ on their personal page and failed to start an appropriate Fan page.

How to Convert a Personal Facebook Page to a Business Fan Page

Facebook’s “Profile To Business Page Migration” tool will help people who either created a personal profile for a business before Pages existed, or accidentally started accumulating fans as friends instead of Likes.  Here’s how to convert a personal Facebook page to a business fan page:

The process is pretty simple, it seems–using the “Profile to Business Migration Tool,” users can move their Facebook profiles into Facebook page territory. At the moment, only a user’s profile pictures and friends will be migrated to their new page, so if you plan on using this tool it would be wise to back-up your Facebook data.  The user’s friends will automatically be converted into fans, or people who “like” the page.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/223853/convert_your_facebook_profile_into_a_business_or_fan_page.html

According to  Jeffrey Zeldman, you may run into some problems when you convert a personal Facebook Page to a business fan page, such as third party apps (Twitter, Tumblr, RSS) disappearing, or losing your custom URLs, and even being unable to admin your own page if Facebook considers the admin to be your old (now deleted) Facebook profile. So the process appears to be a little buggy, for now.  But overall, the benefits of being able to convert a personal Facebook Page to a Business Fan Page is too good an opportunity for businesses to finally be able to separate the two!

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