Brave ED’s Part 2: The difference between your nonprofit’s Facebook Page and a personal Profile

At a discussion on Social Media Return on Engagement last month at an Executive Director Roundtable hosted by the Alliance for Nonprofits and 501 Commons, there were a couple of questions that I didn’t have answers to on the spot. One thing you can be sure of with social media: somebody somewhere has the answer. So I went looking and I am following up on my initial post about Brave ED’s with a couple of additional posts focused on those unanswered questions:

• With help from Abby Nafziger, a member of NPower’s AmeriCorps VISTA team, we’re covering one question today in this Part 2 post about Facebook. Enjoy!
• There’s a Part 3 post coming next week from guest blogger Erica Mills of Claxon Marketing that will elaborate on the hub and spoke model for managing your communications channels. Stay tuned!

-       Peg Giffels

Facebook question: So what’s the difference between a Page, and a personal Profile?

Short Answer

 Pages are for organizations, Profiles are for individuals.

Longer Answer

Pages are used by everyone from nonprofits to celebrities, bands or businesses. Pages create a space on Facebook to interact with customers/fans/constituents/audience/etc. Profiles are the backbone of Facebook and are personalized by individuals in order to connect with friends, reunite with old classmates or just to play Farmville. While you do have to create a personal Profile in order to create a Page, Profiles and Pages remain completely separate publicly.

3 differences between Pages and Profiles

1. Privacy - Page accounts are automatically public facing and open to any Facebook user, while Profiles offer a range of privacy settings ranging from completely public to visible only to the owner of the Profile.
2. Insights - These statistics about Reach, Virality, Demographics and more are only available to Pages, which if you think about it is probably a blessing. You can rest assured that none of your friends will be able to tell how frequently you read their updates, un-friend them or look at their photos.
3. Interactions - Profile users can also choose to “like” a Page, which will give them the ability to write on a Page’s wall and see the Page’s status updates in their news feeds. However Pages administrators are limited to only interacting directly with other Pages and can’t friend personal Profiles or write on their walls.

Want to learn more?

• If you prefer face-to-face instruction, consider signing up for NPower’s FREE Facebook 101 brown bag on May 9^th, or arranging for social media strategy consulting.
• The Nonprofit Facebook Guy details the different forms of interactions possible by Pages and Profiles.
• Beth Kanter provides nonprofits with all the details about the upcoming change to Timeline for Facebook Pages.
• Inside Facebook delivers a comprehensive guide to the algorithms that Facebook uses to determine what activity updates show up in Profile users news feed. [Note: this ranking doesn’t affect Pages, who will always see all the updates from liked Pages in their news feed]

- Abby Nafziger