Should Authors Have a Facebook Profile or Page?
If you are wondering whether authors should have a presence on Facebook, the answer is definitely “yes.” But if you are wondering whether you should have a Facebook Page or a Facebook Profile, the answer is less definite. Each one has pros and cons that you’ll have to weigh for yourself.
If you already have a personal Facebook account, that’s a Profile. Once you have a Profile, you can then also build Pages for a business, brand or public figure. An author could be a business, brand, public figure or a person, so the choice is up to you, depending on how you want to use Facebook.
It may seem logical to separate your personal account from your author account. As much as you love your readers, they aren’t really the same as friends and you may feel uncomfortable sharing private information with strangers who know you more than you know them.
On the other hand, you are using Facebook to build relationships with your readers so they will expect you to share some personal stories and photos. Before you know it, you’re posting a lot of similar content on both accounts and that’s a lot of work.
One big advantage to using a Facebook Profile is that you can have Friends. Business Pages can tag and Like other businesses' Pages, but they can’t tag or Like individual’s Profiles. (If a person Likes a business's Page, the page can then tag them, but still can't Like their Profile.) That’s to protect folks from unrelenting advertisements, but it makes it trickier for a Page to pursue new connections. If you use a Profile, it's easier to reach out to people who are bloggers or editors.
But there are also advantages to Pages that you won’t get with Profiles. You can pre-write status updates and schedule them to be posted in the future on Pages, which you can’t do on your Facebook Profile. Pages can also take advantage of Insights which measures things like how many people have seen your posts, which posts are the most popular, details about your demographics and other interesting facts. That helps you figure out the best ways to reach your readers.
There are a few ways to circumvent the disadvantages, although they may cost a little in extra effort or actual cash. For instance, if you use your personal Profile as your author profile as well, there is an option to enable people to Follow you, which is different from accepting a Friend.
Followers get your public updates (depending on Facebook’s current algorithm), but you don’t get theirs. You can also choose, post by post, whether what you’ve just written will be for Followers to see or only for your Friends so you can keep some personal updates within the circle of your actual friends and family.
You can also use an outside service like Hootsuite or Buffer for scheduling updates to be posted on your Profile in the future. Both of these services are free for a limited number of platforms and they will also provide analytics that show the popularity of your posts and other information, although you will incur a fee for that option.
If you do a little sleuthing on Facebook, you’ll notice that some authors use Pages and some authors use Profiles. Unfortunately there isn’t a perfect solution. Weigh the options and decide what will work best for your situation.
The important thing is to be on Facebook and keep building your reader relationships. If you let your connections lapse, there will be no one there when you want to make a big announcement for an event or book launch. Social media marketing is what we do these days. And that goes for authors, too.
Photo by Anton