If you are predominantly on Facebook for business purposes rather than socializing with friends, you may want to convert your Facebook profile into a Facebook page. But beware of the consequences of making such a move. A lot of bloggers who have attempted to do this had to face some unpleasant consequences. Before proceeding with such a move, check out the perils of converting your Facebook profile to a Facebook Page.
Perils of Converting Your Facebook Profile to A Facebook Page
1. You Cannot Transfer Content
When you convert your Facebook Profile to a Facebook Fan Page, only your profile picture will be transferred. All other photos, content, wall posts, comments and likes will be removed.
2. Messages Will No Longer Be Available
The Facebook messages application will no longer be available and all messages in your Facebook profile page will be lost.
3. You Will Not Have Access to Applications Connected to Your Facebook Account
If you have allowed access to applications linked to your Facebook account, you will lose that access and may need to reconnect again if required.
4. Facebook Username May Not Be Transferred
All users with fewer than 100 friends can rename the recently converted page, but if your profile has more than a 100 friends, you will have to use your profile name as the name of your page.
5. No Notification to Friends of Conversion
If you have converted your profile to a page, be warned that your page will not appear in the interest section of your profile friends pages. Furthermore, your profile friends will not be notified that their Friend status has been turned into a Like status.
6. No Personal Engagement is Possible
The newly converted page will become a Business Account where you can only create and manage pages, and administer ad campaigns. You cannot send or receive friend requests.
7. You May Lose Your Profile Username
If you have crossed over to pages, and you try creating a new personal profile with the original user name, it will not happen as usernames are unique and can be used only once!
8. Not Possible to Revert
Once you have made the switch from a profile page to a fan page, you cannot undo the change.
So if you are thinking about making the switch, exercise due caution, download your profile content and then proceed.
At the time of writing this post, the migration tool was inaccessible. I guess the folks at Facebook have been making a lot of changes/testing in the public glare and a lot of reviews are rewritten in the wake of recall of Facebook changes. Is this going to be one of them? Only time will tell.
How would downloading the profile be useful? AFAIK, Facebook does not allow users to re-import the downloaded profile.
Well, It serves no other purpose than as a back up of content you might otherwise not have. I don’t suppose you’d like to lose your photo albums, conversations with friends and stuff that are good to reminisce at a future date. I guess Facebook does have some import options if not all.