Clarifying Facebook Profiles and Facebook Pages

When you first sign up for a Facebook account, by the terms of Facebook your account must be in your own name. This is a Profile that people can "friend."

Your Profile account has a range of privacy controls – you can decide how much you want people to know.

One warning: No matter how tightly you put the privacy controls, please don't put anything on any social media site that you wouldn't be comfortable with the world knowing.

Now Facebook Pages are what Facebook used to call fan pages and now just calls Pages. A Facebook Page can be used for your business, book, or cause – and people now "like" a Page (rather than "fan" a Page).

To create a Page, go to www.Facebook.com/pages/create.php

A major reason it is so important to have a Facebook Page for your business, book or cause is because the title of a Facebook Page is searchable inside and outside Facebook.

It used to be, when you created the title for your Facebook Page, you couldn't change the title. Now you can change the title up until your Page has 100 "likes."

Here are the current different category choices for you to choose from when you create a Facebook Page:

• local business or place

• company, organization or institution

• brand or product

• artist, band or public figure

• entertainment

• cause of community

What if you mistakenly used your business name on your Profile?

If Facebook discovers this, Facebook could eliminate your business name Profile without any warning, although Facebook does make some exceptions to this policy.

The good news? Now there is actually a way to correct your mistake by switching your business name Profile to a Facebook Page without losing the people who previously "friended" your Profile and now are assumed to have "liked" your Page.

Read about how to do this, including what remains and what disappears when you make the change.

© 2011 Miller Mosaic LLC

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller on Twitter) is the co-founder of the social media marketing company Miller Mosaic LLC.

Get the free information "8 Social Media Marketing Mistakes" and "Social Media Marketing Does Not Magically Work; You Have to Work It" at www.facebook.com/millermosaicsocialmedia