how to convert a facebook profile to a facebook page

I’ve a confession to make. Years and years ago, before people knew the difference between pages, groups and profiles, i set up a leaving cert facebook profile for theleavingcert.com…

I’ve known for quite some time, that account violated their terms of service. At any moment the Facebook SWAT team could have broken in and shut the entire leaving cert / facebook operation down. But they didn’t. I got away with it.

Determined to clean up my act, i went searching for ways of converting Facebook profiles to pages, but i didn’t want to ‘lose’ the 750+ friends we’d accumulated on our Facebook profile. Granted, most of them aren’t even sitting their leaving cert this year but still, they beef up the numbers nicely Plus on occasion we get the odd question through Facebook from old leaving cert students so severing ties with all those guys didn’t appeal to me.

Yesterday, i discovered there is a way of converting a facebook profile to a facebook page whilst converting your friends to ‘likes’ and thus ensuring no ties are severed. Facebook actually provide a tool to do that. It’s literally a case of clicking a few buttons. But don’t take any chances… backup and download your facebook profile before you do anything.

photo credit: smemon87

You can also keep that old Facebook profile and convert it in to a business account which means you can continue to manage all pages through that account. Even better news, because we have several leaving cert related pages, set up by our leaving cert profile with thousands of ‘likes’.

Yesterday, the official ‘theleavingcert.com’ facebook page (aka ‘http://www.facebook.com/pages/theleavingcertcom/147494288617592’) had 29 ‘likes’. Today, the official ‘theleavingcert.com’ page (aka ‘http://www.facebook.com/theleavingcert‘) has 752 ‘likes’. That’s more like it. The url is shorter, sweeter and our like count has exploded overnight.

We can now begin our annual ‘we must do something with that leaving cert site’ routine confident in the knowledge we’ve an army of 750+ fans on Facebook ready and waiting to be spammed in a bid to help us grow stronger. Ok, so that’s not how it works out loud and in public, but seriously, this one move has extended our reach from 29 people to over 750 with a few clicks.

So if you’re in a similar situation (and i know several people & even businesses are – some pretty well known businesses too), make the switch today. Not only is it technically against Facebook’s terms and conditions to have a profile if you’re not a private individual, you’re limited to 5000 friends which hopefully (some day) you’re gonna surpass.