So you’re a financial planner looking to use Facebook to promote your business and generate more prospects. Awesome.

But the big question you have is “Do I use my personal Facebook profile, or do I need a business page?”

For many people, using their personal profile is the simplest way to get started. But not necessarily the best.

The advantage of using your personal profile is obvious – you already have it set up, you (hopefully) have a number of Facebook friends and it’s a simple matter to write a status update or share an article.

Another advantage of using a personal profile that I hear from many people is that it helps your clients learn more about you and your personal life. If they connect with you on Facebook they’ll see all the things you post. All the things you post. If you post about your family, they’ll see that. If you post things about sport or politics it’ll be seen.

The problem with this is that at some point you may decide you need to draw a line between your personal life and business life.

I know of a number of people in the public eye who started off accepting friend requests from fans and followers but quickly decided that there were areas of their life they didn’t want to make too public.

I agree that it’s a great idea for clients to see you as a person and not just in your business persona. But there are other ways to achieve that and it can be done via a Business Page.

In my opinion, the best and most flexible option is to set up a Facebook Business Page.

This is a Page in the name of your business that people can find by searching for your business name on Facebook. I’m sure you’re familiar with the concept.

There are a number of differences between a business page and a personal profile page. Let’s look at the main ones.

Keep your business life and personal life separate

You may feel that it’s important to have a distinction between business and your private life. This doesn’t mean that you don’t share things that are going on in your life on your business page, it just means that you can control what gets posted.

Promotes the business, not an individual

There’s a balance here. Many advisers are building corporatised businesses where the business is less dependant on an individual and the team approach is emphasised. Using a Facebook Page makes it easier to focus on the business rather than the individual.

However, successful users of social media realise that the human touch is all important so they make a choice to feature a lot of human images and stories in their newsfeed.

If you’re in a business where there is no interest in using Facebook or social media, then an option for you may still be to set up a business page, but name it after yourself i.e. Allan Ward – Financial Planner. I’ve seen a number of planners do this so they can promote their personal brand, but keep it on a business level without needing to divulge too much of their personal life.

Marketing Opportunities

A business page enables you to begin advertising on Facebook. This is a massive opportunity and can be a way to accelerate your growth. But it’s not available for your personal profile, it’s only available to Pages.

You’re able to advertise your business to existing clients, friends of existing clients, people in your local area, people who like a particular TV show or hobby – there is a huge range of targeting options.

Re-targeting

Have you ever been on a website, then looked on Facebook and started to see ads from that website? That’s the power of re-targeting.

When someone comes to your site to look around (a potential client), they can be marked with a Facebook pixel that’s unique to your website. Then, when they’re on Facebook, you can serve up an ad that promotes your business. This can be an incredibly effective way to nudge someone into taking action and calling you. But you can’t do it with a personal profile.

A More Defined Message

Your personal Facebook profile probably has a mixture of posts – you may promote something work-related, maybe something personal or family-related, and maybe things that are of interest to your personally – sporting teams, hobbies etc.

A Facebook Business Page can be a lot more focused. You can still post a variety of different types of posts, but they can all be relevant to your business and the niche you’re targeting.

This can make it more interesting to your target market.

Search Engine Friendly

If you Google your business name, hopefully, your website comes up in the number 1 spot in the search results. But what else comes up in those results?

Having a Facebook Business Page makes it more likely that this will appear in the first few spots in the search results.

And if you have a LinkedIn page for your business, that’ll probably appear somewhere in the top five positions. Your private LinkedIn profile may also appear here depending on how you’ve optimised it.

The strategy here is to have some control over the top search results. So when people search for your business, they’re finding sites and web pages that you control.

Ease of connection

When someone wants to connect with you personally on Facebook, they send you a friend request. And you need to approve that request.

When they want to connect with your Facebook Business Page, they simply like the Page – there’s no approval process and it’s instant.  Sometimes people aren’t ready to call you up and make an appointment. But they’ll connect with you on Social Media and check you out. So a Facebook Page makes this a lot easier to do so.

Less Clutter In Your Feed

When you use your personal Facebook account and accept friend requests from clients and prospects, their posts will appear in your feed. You may not want to see all the updates that people you don’t know very well post. And they may not want to see your posts of a personal nature.

So by getting your fans to connect with a Business Facebook Page, you’re keeping a distinction between your personal and business life and de-cluttering your Facebook feed.

Reviews

One of the great features of a Business Page is that people are able to leave reviews of your business, creating some very powerful social proof. It’s not too hard to ask existing clients to leave a review on your Facebook Page – you’ll find most will be happy to do so. When new prospects are looking over your page they’ll see those reviews and that could help in their decision of whether to choose you or not.

Setting up a Facebook Business Page is a very simple process that can be done in under five minutes. We’ve made it easy for you by setting up a free course that shows you how. Click here to learn how to set up a Facebook Page for your Financial Planning business.

Where to from here?

Do you have a business Facebook Page? If you don’t, set one up today.

Do you use your personal page instead? If you do, have a think about the issues I’ve raised and whether a business page is more appropriate.

And don’t forget to head over to our Facebook Page and give us a like!