Facebook Pages are reserved specifically for business. Facebook makes it very clear that if any businesses using profiles will be deleted. This frustrates a lot of people because they feel it’s more difficult to engage with them than with profiles. This is partially true and done by design. Facebook spam is incredibly annoying as it is and opening it up to Pages would make it even worse.

Remember MySpace in it’s heyday? I was spreading the word about how MySpace was going to reinvent the industry. “You can reach out to anyone and open up a world of possible contacts!” I would tell people. And this is exactly what killed MySpace.

Everything started off great. I remember I got my MySpace profile set up all slick like. I had a real estate plat as my background, cheesy Realtor photo in the upper left corner, all the bio filled out to tell you how great I was, and my favorite song playing as soon as you landed on the page (yeah I can’t believe I did something so jackass either). I set out to make friends with everyone and become a millionaire in a year. Then something happened. I would friend someone and next thing I know I’ve got some super sparkley animated thank you on my wall. Then it’s Christmas and my wall fills up with what feels like greeting cards with pasties. It felt like Geocities and Comet cursors all over again. MySpace spam had taken over.

This is about the time Facebook opened up to the public. Facebook wasn’t designed for businesses in the beginning. In order to create a layer of privacy Facebook Pages were created specifically for businesses. This created a ton of confusion because pages were similar yet different. Most small business owners didn’t understand the difference in pages and profiles or that you have to have a profile to create a page. So they were still creating profiles for their business. Or they understood the difficulties of engaging with a page on a personal level and chose to use a profile instead. Besides being annoying and technically spam under Facebook’s design these profiles for businesses get deleted if found by Facebook.

Recent changes to pages allow them to engage more like a person because you can reach out to other pages. Your page can like and comment on other pages but this still doesn’t satisfy some businesses because they want to reach out to individuals, not businesses. However, if Facebook Pages could interact on profiles it could expose Facebook to becoming MySpaced.

If you like a Page with your personal profile its posts get mixed in with your activity stream. There is an art and science to getting posts to all into the “Most Popular” stream because if your post isn’t there it’s likely to get overlooked. It would be much easier to engage if pages could comment on fans walls. But would this be engagement or an intrusion? Post something like, “Thanks for being a fan, you rock” and other worthless comments and watch people block and unfan like crazy. Even if your an individual professional such as a Realtor taking your business to your clients profiles is not a good idea. Can you imagine waking up to find your personal profile wall has tons of “Great new house you’ll love,” “Don’t forget I’m your neighborhood Realtor,” or “Here’s a list of great things to do in our town” like you don’t already know what there is to do in your town.

So I for one am happy that Pages can’t engage on my profile wall. As a private consultant it makes it more difficult for me as well but I understand the benefits it has on my profile. Instead I focus on making friends with other professionals that are in similar situations. We engage each others pages with our own. This creates activity which makes your posts more important and it allows you to expose your page.

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