Businesses need to be aware of several issues when setting up Facebook accounts and business fan pages:

An individual can only have one personal Facebook account. Using multiple accounts violates Facebook’s terms of use, and may result in having one or more of the Facebook accounts shut down.

Currently, users who want to isolate their business persona from their personal persona are out of luck. Even thought it’s possible to create a business account, business account owners are not supposed to have a separate personal account.

There’s a bit of a way around this: set up a business fan page. An individual Facebook user can set up multiple fan pages, one or more of which can relate to business concerns. Messages from a fan page appear to come from the page rather than the page administrator.

Businesses need to be choosy in setting up business pages. The key administrator for a business page cannot be reassigned. Until Facebook fixes this, the original administrator is permanent. It is possible to assign additional administrators, but the original administrator still retains control. For this reason I recommend that for now, have the business owner initiate the business page setup with Facebook. The owner can assign an additional administrator to the page if that is desired.

Related articles

• Does every small business need a Facebook Fan Page? (startups.com)
• Facebook’s collosal Social Media Fail, where’s Mashable to break this story? (theresabloginmysoup.com)

This entry was posted on Monday, February 1st, 2010 at 6:09 am and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.