I have had a number of requests recently about how your Facebook fan pages integrates with your Facebook personal page. There is a lot of confusion over Facebook’s differentiation of Facebook’s Fan Page and Facebook Personal Page.

Facebook Fan Pages vs Facebook Personal Pages

Facebook Fan Pages are also called Facebook Business Pages and Facebook Like Pages. According to Facebook’s definition, Pages are for organizations, businesses, celebrities, and bands to broadcast great information in an official, public manner to people who choose to connect with them. Basically when you want to get the word out about your business you are officially supposed to use your army of Facebook Fan Pages to help build your brand.

Facebook Personal Pages are the pages for individuals profiles. You are not allowed (or supposed) to have any business name or organization run through a profile page. A number of the previous profile pages that represented organizations were suspended.

Facebook Fan Pages Integration Challenges

There are a few challenges with integrating Facebook Fan Pages with the rest of Facebook. The challenge resides in the fact that it has always seemed that Facebook Fan Pages were an afterthought to Facebook. When a 19 year old college student creates a revolutionary social network for other college students he does not anticipate what happens when that network expands past students and to adults, especially business professionals.

There is no way to know that entrepreneurs will want to connect with business partners and clients. So, they created fan pages. For a time this device worked ok, but the limitations, such as not being able to connect with your fans on a more personal level on their personal fan page and not being able to directly ask people to join their fan page without doing a pay per click model.

Facebook Fan Pages Benefits

That being said there are many benefits for having Facebook fan pages. They are a tremendous help in growing your readership for your blog, because they act as a RSS feed in conjunction with networked blogs. That way you can have people regularly read your posts and become more engaged and involved members of your blog. Those readers will then eventually become clients.

I have had Facebook fan page sign up sheets on the sidebar of this blog for the past year now, and it has been a tremendous benefit. Feel free to like this blog on Facebook!

Additionally it provides another touchpoint where prospects can reach you to discuss their challenges and begin doing business with you. It is amazing how I get 2-3 prospects/clients every month who come to me through my fan page.

All in all Facebook fan pages are great, I just want to have the ability to message individual page members about questions they have or send out basic information on social networking to a group of fans. Additionally, being able to see what they put on their wall will enable this to be more of a two way street for communication with your network.

When that happens then Facebook fan pages will be fully integrated with Facebook personal pages in my opinion.