I’ve been hearing stories recently about Facebook finally enforcing certain aspects of their Terms of Service – particularly the rule that profiles have to be real people, not businesses.

Many people are confused by what Facebook’s rules are, so here’s my rundown, along with how this affects you and what you can do to protect yourself.

A personal page, or personal profile, is one with friends.  A “Business page,” or what used to be called a Fan Page, has “likes.”

A personal page is supposed to be just for real people, not businesses.  This has always been true – but for the longest time Facebook has let it slide.  Now, it sounds like they are starting to crack down on it.

If you currently have a personal page set up in your business name, you are exposing yourself to having that page shut down at any time, without any notice and without recourse.  So here’s what you need to do to protect yourself:

1. Save all your photos, notes and videos to another location (or transfer them to a fan page)
2. If you have a Bio that you particularly like how it’s worded, make sure to copy that someplace else too.
3. Take screenshots of any testimonials or other conversational threads from your wall that you want to keep for posterity.
4. Most important of all: Make sure that if the personal profile in question is the admin of your fan page, that you have someone else also set up as an admin.  Because if Facebook shuts down your personal page and it’s the only way you have to access your fan page, then your Fan Page is effectively lost too.

The next step is to get a Fan Page properly set up, as soon as possible, and start moving your Friends over to your new Fan Page.  I produced a video for my Gold Members about exactly how to do this, entitled, “Get 100’s of Fansin 24 Hours or Less.”

Normally you have to be a Gold Member to access this video training, but I am going to make it accessible to everyone – just as a thank you for reading this blog post!  However, that access will only be available for a short time, and I will put it back to being exclusively for Gold Members soon.  So hurry up and go watch it!

In the video training, I show you how to set up your Fan Page and how to properly name it, then walk you through six killer strategies for getting new fans.  Hint: The worst way to move your Friends to your Fan Page is simply to “Suggest”
your page to them.  You weren’t planning to do that, were you?  lol