Should I Post to My Personal Facebook Account or My Business Page?

There are lots of opinions on how to use business and personal accounts for posting about your business. Here’s a list of the pros and cons so you can decide what balance feels right for you.

I’ll also give my personal preference below the pros and cons, though the quick take is that I suggest using a mix and I think the 80/20 rule can be a good guideline. Most of you are going to have well-rounded friend lists with those who are not interested in seeing your business-related posts. Overall, those that do want to know all about your business happenings can and will follow your business page. 

And even if you choose to post mostly or all on your personal account, you should still have a Business Page for other reasons. Check out the post “Do I need a Facebook Page as a reflexologist?”

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Using your personal feed to post business related content

Pros

• Facebook has stated their goal is to show more posts from friends and family, people we are personally connected to in our newsfeed. They use an algorithm to do so. (Basically a complex mathematical equation that weighs a lot of factors including who we tend to interact with by liking, sharing, and commenting on their posts as well as posts in general that get better engagement than average.) So your personal posts have a better chance of being seen in the newsfeed.
• Sometimes our friends and family want to know about our professional pursuits but don’t know about or forget to follow the business page. 
• It helps people connect with you to see you as a real person they can connect with and that can lead to trusting you as a reflexologist too. 
• Friending clients can help them connect with you and keep you “top-of-mind” which is an important marketing goal.
• If you are friends with your clients you can show support and engage on their posts.
• You can create “Friend lists” to help control who sees certain posts (such as a local only list and a client list)

Cons

• Lots of people on our friends list are not local to us and can’t actually become customers.
• People use social media to know what’s going on and stay connected, but they don’t want to feel like they are being promoted to all the time. They prefer to “opt-in” to marketing messages, which means following your business if they want to hear about it. 
• Plenty of people will choose to “unfollow” or “unfriend” people who post too often about their business or other topics they don’t find interesting. Let’s face it as much as we think everyone should choose reflexology, it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. 
• Not everyone is comfortable being “friends” with people they only know in a professional capacity. Many of your clients may feel uncomfortable if you send them a friend request after their first visit before they get to know you. (Or vice versa, you may not want to share things with your clients that you do your close friends and family and that’s okay too.)
• Sometimes a perfectly good professional relationship can be ruined by the things we or our clients share on Facebook about beliefs. 
• If you post only to your friend list (typically the default) and not public, your friends and clients can’t easily share your posts to their own feed. 
• If someone who isn’t Facebook friends with you wants to message you, it’s easy to miss the messages that go to the “other requests” folder instead of your normal messenger inbox.
• There’s no option for call-to-action buttons.
• You can’t schedule posts (on August 1, 2018, Facebook removed the ability for third-party scheduling tools to schedule Facebook posts to personal profiles.)

Using your Business Page Feed 

Pros

• Everyone who follows your page has chosen to opt-in to hear about your business. You know these people want to hear what you have to say about reflexology, health, etc. (Of course, you still want to tailor your posts to connect with your audience and try to create engagement vs just selling all the time.)
• Everything you post as your business account is easy for your followers to share to their feeds, on their own business’s page, or in personal messages.
• If your clients tag your business page, everyone can easily see all the information on your business because everything on your page is public. 
• It’s designed to communicate the business information with clear places to find your website, hours, address, phone, booking option, about information, reviews and testimonials, etc. 
• Insights, aka data about your fans, how many saw your posts, how many shared it, clicked on your links, etc. can help you see what’s working and what’s not. 
• You can use insights to see when your fans tend to be online and that helps you decide the best times to post and be seen by more of your audience.
• You can keep Facebook messages to your business separate from your personal messages.
• Call to action button lets you pick what action you want people to take, such as joining your email list, booking a session, etc.  for people visiting your page and even on some of your posts they see in their feed. 
• If someone is searching for your business, the business page is more likely to show up in the Facebook search results as well as on search engines like Google.
• If you want to use Facebook ads, you need to use your Business Page.
• You can easily invite people who have reacted to your Business posts (likes, hearts, etc.), but haven’t liked your page to do so.
• While it may seem like it’s harder to get reach posting as your Business Page, Facebook does show page posts in the newsfeed regularly. In fact I just checked and this is the order of posts in my feed:

1. Birthday reminder for a friend
2. Friend post
3. Sponsored ad post
4. Page I “Like”
5. Page I “Like”
6. Page I “Like”
7. Post from a group I’m in
8. Sponsored ad post
9. Post from a group I’m in
10. Friend post

I have more posts from “Business Pages” I follow than “friends” in the first 10 posts I see when visiting Facebook. All 3 of these pages that I’m seeing are ones where I tend to “like” their posts. So Facebook knows that I enjoy seeing their content.

For added proof, several days later I checked again and here are the first 10 posts I am seeing:

1. Page I “Like”
2. Sponsored ad post
3. Friend post
4. Page I “Like”
5. Friend commenting on a Page I “Like”
6. Page I “Like”
7. Sponsored ad post
8. Friend post
9. Page I “Like”
10. Post from a group I’m in

Cons

• Your posts will rarely be seen by most of the people that are fans of your page and this can feel frustrating. (Though we don’t have the analytics to show how many of our “friends” see our personal posts, I know I certainly don’t see everything they post either.)
• Facebook has acknowledged that they do treat pages differently in the newsfeed algorithm, though we don’t know exactly how. 
• Some people might not want to take the extra time to like your page.
• Some might not want to interact because page posts are public. 
• You can’t see or interact with most posts made my the fans of your Page unless they comment on your page. 
• You can’t message people as your page unless they’ve engaged first with you. 

Summary: Business Pages Offer More 

Facebook wants you to promote and talk about your business using a Business Page and they’ve definitely stacked the cards in favor of doing so. The benefits are there and they are worth it in my opinion. 

What’s even more important though is that most people I talk to don’t want to see you regularly posting about your business on your personal account. 

Friending clients is a very personal decision. I usually accept all requests from clients, but let them lead and don’t seek them out. I don’t accept friend requests from people I think are just friending me to try and sell to me (happens a lot in many of the business groups I’m in). Go with your gut on this and what feels right. 

Post mostly to your Business Page, but it’s okay to occasionally share a post from the Business Page to your personal feed — yes, I would post to the Business Page first so it’s easy for your friends to find your Page if they want to follow you there too. I would do this for your most important posts that you want to give a bit of an engagement boost too as well as those that are performing well on your page and likely to resonate well with your friend list too.

It’s also okay to occasionally post things only to your personal feed that talks about reflexology or what you are doing related to your business. Such as: 

• Sharing a personal win or milestone
• Posting about the benefits of reflexology
• Posting about events you are attending or offering
• Anything fun, whimsical, or entertaining (people come to social media to connect, but also and maybe even moreso these days out of boredom and seeking to be entertained or escape reality)
• Anything you are proud of (even if it’s just a clever marketing idea as you can be proud of your posts too)
• Anything you’d want to hear about from your friend’s business 

At the end of the day, it comes down to what feels right for you and your business. We all bring a least a bit (often a lot) of ourselves into our businesses, so how you market your business needs to reflect that too. 

Want to learn more about social media marketing? You’ll find a number of posts clicking that link. You can also sign up for the email list to get marketing tips every other week, and join the Reflexology Marketing Facebook Group to ask questions. 

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