According to Inside Facebook, the social giant has released a new migration tool that will allow personal profiles on the website to be converted into business pages, opening the door for businesses that originally created the wrong type of profile to move to the more corporate-friendly page structure.
Profiles that are converted will lose much of their data, with Facebook stating that if a profile is converted to a business page, “only [its] profile photo and friends will be moved to [the] new Page. No other content will be moved.” That should keep most people from pulling the practical joke of taking a truly personal profile and turning it into a ‘business.’
You can access the migration tool here. This is what the page looks like:
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Facebook has prepared an information page on the tool to help guide people in its use.
According to Facebook the chief reason for converting a profile to a page is that “pages offer more robust features for organizations, businesses, brands, and public figures.” Also, Facebook claims that “maintaining a profile for anything other than an individual person is a violation of” its rules. The help section goes on to say that organizations in violation of this rule are in risk of having their profiles deleted.
The process, according to some users, is less than smooth. According to Jeffrey Zeldman, the migration tool made the admin for his page the user profile that Facebook had deleted during the migration, rendering him unable to post content or make changes to the page.
Why is Facebook enacting this push to move businesses to pages? We suspect that the company wants to have its total content more uniformly organized, preventing user confusion and helping businesses connect in the way that it sees fit with users. And hey, once a company has a page, they might as well advertise it, right? Last time we checked you weren’t allowed to run ads to accumulate friends on Facebook, but you sure can to garner Likes with dollars.
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