Transcription
What's the difference between a Facebook profile and a Facebook page? And then what about Facebook groups? How are they different?
Most business owners don't know the difference between a profile, a page, and a group. And they especially don't know which of those three they should be using to maximize the size of their audience, to maximize engagement, and to maximize sales.
Well, by the end of this video, you're going to know the differences between each of the three: A profile, a page, and a group. And more importantly, you're going to know exactly which one or which ones you should be using for your business to maximize your growth. Let's dive in.
I'll admit it can be a little bit confusing. Facebook gives us three options for using the Facebook platform. You can use a profile, you can use a page, and you can use a group. And we're going to walk through each of the three, looking at the pros and cons of each, so you can decide which of these three you need to be using for your business.
So, let's start off by taking a look at a profile. Here I am over on my profile. And if you're using Facebook, you have a profile. It's required in order to use Facebook. You have to sign up for a profile. And a profile originally was intended for you to be able to connect with your friends and family. That was the idea. You could share what you're up to. You can share about your trips. You can share about your special moments with your personal friends and family. But as Facebook has evolved, business owners started posting business content on their profile. And as you'll see in a second, Facebook actually started catering to this use by providing more and more business tools on your profile so that you can actually use it to grow a business.
Let's take a look at some of the pros of using a profile to grow your business. The first great thing about using a profile to grow your business is that you're guaranteed to get reach with your posts. And that simply means that when you post something like this right here, it's guaranteed that people are going to see that. And why is that true? Well, think about the nature of Facebook. What Facebook's intended to do. If you went on Facebook and you created a profile like you're required to do and you started posting content and zero people saw your posts, would you go back? Would you ever use Facebook? And the answer is no. Facebook needs to show posts through profiles. Otherwise, people won't use their profiles. They'll start using another social media platform. So, you're guaranteed to get reach when you post. I'll show you an example. Here's this post again, and I'm going to go down to the insights. We'll talk about insights in a second. And you can see this right here. This is the reach. This is the number of unique people who saw this particular post. So this one post over, 300 people saw it. That's absolutely free. I didn't have to pay Facebook. All I had to do was create a piece of content. And the same is true for you. When you post, people are going to see your posts.
The second thing that's really great about using Facebook profiles for your business is the fact that you can grow quite a substantial audience size. I'll show you a couple ways you can do that. One is I'm going to go down here and you can see the list of friends that I have on Facebook. You get friends by sending friend requests to people. And when you send someone a friend request, it's saying that you want to connect with them on Facebook. And when they accept your friend request, they go over here. They become one of your friends. Now, on your profile, you're maxed out at having 5,000 friends, which is pretty substantial. Think about this for your business. If you have 5,000 leads sitting in your friends list, that's quite a good audience size. However, even better than that, Facebook recently introduced an option of gaining followers through your profile. So, you can see that I had about 5,000 friends, but I also have 10,000 followers. And this number of followers is unlimited. You can grow it to thousands and thousands and thousands of followers, meaning that the size of your audience for your business can grow infinitely, which is very, very important.
Now, while I'm here talking about followers, I want to mention this. On your profile, you can also follow other people who you find to be interesting. And you can see I'm following 3.6,000 people. Why would you want to do this? Well, when you follow someone, this is you telling Facebook that you want to see more of their content in your feed. You're maybe not necessarily a friend with them. Maybe you don't want to have an actual relationship. You're not planning on messaging them. You just want to see their content. And I'll give you an example. I often follow people who work in the same industry as me. And so, I want to see what's going on from their perspective. What are they posting about? What are their audiences interested in?
Now, this the idea of gaining followers and following people, this leads into another advantage of using your profile for business. I'm going to go over here to these three dots. Click on the three dots and you'll see right here and it says turn off because I've already turned on professional mode. If you don't have your professional mode turned on, you're going to have an option to turn it on here. Professional mode is Facebook's way of saying, "Okay, you're using your profile for business. We want to give you more advantages. We want to give you more business tools." And when you turn on professional mode, the look of your profile isn't going to change. It's still going to be very similar in the way that it looks and functions. You're still going to be capped at having 5,000 friends, but when you turn on professional mode, that's when you're going to be able to have unlimited followers and you're going to start getting a bunch of business tools. Let's go over here. You'll see this blue button here. Once you turn on your professional mode, you're going to get this. It's called a professional dashboard. And I'm going to go over here. You're going to see that there's all kinds of metrics where you can see how your audience is growing, how they're engaging with you. Um, you can take a look at your content and see which posts are performing the best, which ones are getting the most engagement and the most reach. All of these tools are very helpful for fine-tuning the way that you use your profile to engage your audience, to grow your audience, to nurture leads, and to make sales. So, all of this is available to you when you turn on professional mode, using your personal profile.
I'm going to go back to my personal profile because I want to show you one more advantage of using a personal profile to grow your business. And that's this right here. You see this blue check mark? This is a metaverified check mark. And you can see right here it says accounts with a verified badge have been authenticated. So basically this is your way of saying you're legitimate. You're using your profile for business. You're an authority in your industry. And this builds a lot of trust. When your leads or people that you're connecting with on Facebook, when they see this blue check mark, it's more likely that they're going to believe that you're legitimate. Again, that you're an authority, that you're someone who has some value to offer. This is a paid for service. Depending on where you live, this costs somewhere between $10 and $20 on a monthly basis and does come with some other benefits. This is getting metaverified through your personal profile again which helps build your authority on the platform.
There's one more pro or advantage of using your personal profile for your business. And I'm going to show you an example right over here. This is an example of a post that I made on my personal profile. And you can see in this example there's 54 comments on this post. Let's imagine that these 54 people are leads for your business. Well, what do you want to do with these leads next? Using a personal profile, you can reach out to them personally over in Messenger. So, let's take Amado. Here's an example. I'm going to hover over him and I can simply click on this button here. It says message and you can see Messenger pops up over here. There's a conversation happening between Amado and myself. And so, this is a huge advantage when you're using your personal profile for business on Facebook. You can message anyone on the platform. You can strike up an individual conversation with them directly in Messenger, which is probably the best place to sell your products and services. Rarely would I ever go and make a post that's just a direct sales pitch saying, "Go and buy this thing." Instead, a better strategy is often to create content that engages people like this and then strike up personal conversations with them and then make them an offer over in Messenger. And this can be done again just using your personal profile.
So, those are some of the pros, the advantages of using your personal profile for business. Well, what about cons? What are some of the disadvantages? There are three real disadvantages of using your personal profile.
First, you can get restrictions or blocks if you do too much activity using your personal profile. I'll give you an example. We talked about getting friends, how you can have 5,000 friends on your personal profile. If you were to go out and started sending, let's say, hundreds of friend requests to people in a single day, Facebook would see that as being spammy activity and it could give your account a restriction. It could block you from using that feature on Facebook, usually for 24 hours, but sometimes it could be longer and longer. And so this can slow down your progress because you're operating under limits when you're using your personal profile for business. That is one con.
Another con is that some features just aren't available on your personal profile. I'll show you an example over here. I'm going to go over to my profile and let's just say I want to create a piece of content. I'm just going to say test here. And let's imagine that I want to schedule this piece of content to be posted tomorrow. And you can see when you take a look down here, it says schedule your post from Meta Business Suite. And it sounds like it's going to allow you to do that to schedule a post on your personal profile, but that's not actually the case. Your Meta Business Suite is something completely separate. We're going to look at that in a second. And so that is one of the disadvantages of using your personal profile is there's some features that simply aren't available through your profile.
And then lastly, third, the third disadvantage of using your profile for business is you can't share your profile. So let's imagine that you have a team working for you. You have an assistant who you want to be doing your work on Facebook. You can't assign an assistant to have access to your personal profile. Your personal profile is for you only. So if you wanted someone to be doing some work on your personal profile, for example, creating content or in this case, there's a bunch of people here who are asking for something, if I wanted to and assign an assistant to go through and reply to these comments, I couldn't do it. I would actually have to give them my login for my personal Facebook profile, which could be something that maybe you're not comfortable with giving out your password, your login information for your personal profile. So really, your personal profile is intended to be used by you.
This leads to the question, should you be using your personal profile for business? And the answer is yes. First off, you're required to have a personal profile in order to use Facebook. But second, the ability to build an audience very quickly through your personal profile and guaranteed reach with your posts, meaning that at least some of your audience is guaranteed to see your posts. That's an awesome feature. And then as those leads engage with your content, you can reach out to all of them via messenger, striking up a personal conversation and working them towards making a purchase from you. So these are huge advantages for growing your business using a profile.
Now, let's move on and talk about Facebook business pages. Business pages like this one right here. This is actually an old business page of mine from a previous business that I ran. Business pages, they're set up by businesses, by brands, by influencers who want to grow their reach. They want to grow their audience, but not on a personal level. They're not using their personal profile to grow that audience. They're growing their audience using a business page, a separate entity from who they are personally on Facebook. And there are some big advantages of using a business page to grow your business.
I'm going to show you one example right here. Let me go over to this example is Leonardo DiCaprio. So he's a personal brand. He's an influencer. And you notice this right here. He's got 18 million followers. So by default, business pages can have unlimited followers, which means you can grow an extraordinarily huge audience like Leonardo DiCaprio has here.
The second advantage of having a business page is you can have DM conversations. So personal conversations with your leads who engage with your business page. I'm going to show you over here. Here I am inside Messenger for one of my business pages. And you can see this lead here messaged me saying he watched a video of mine and he was asking about a product and a price. And so then I could reply to him and we could have a conversation inside Messenger. So this conversation is not me personally, Dave Smith. It's my business page engaging with this lead. Now this looks great. It sounds great. There is a problem with this system, and I'll mention that when we get to the cons of operating a business page, but I do want you to know that yes, you can have messenger conversations with your leads when they engage with you first. So, notice in this case, the lead messaged me. That's key. We'll come back to that in a second.
Now, I'm going to go back over to Leonardo DiCaprio here, and you'll notice that he also has a metaverified badge. So, again, this is on his business page. He's metaverified. Just like we looked at with your personal profile, you can also become verified, still a paid for service, telling the world that you're authentic, you're legit, you're not a scammer, you're doing proper business, you have some value to offer. And as we talked about earlier, this will help build your authority, build trust with your audience. So being metaverified through a business page is also an advantage.
But probably the biggest advantage of using a business page to grow your business is this. It's the meta business suite. And inside your Meta Business Suite, you're given a whole host of tools that'll help you grow your audience and engage with your audience. So, as an example, you can run ads, you can plan content, you can see all sorts of insights, you can message with your leads once they've instigated that message with you. And in addition to all this, there's something that you can't do through your profile that we talked about a minute ago. Let me show you. Over in your business suite, there's the ability for you to assign users to your account. And so, you can see over here under users, there's different types of users. And you can click on this blue button right here that says invite people. And you can invite people from your team to come and work through your business page on your behalf. This means that those people could be running ads for you. They could be creating and scheduling content for you. They could be following up in Messenger when leads reach out to you. There's all kinds of things that your team can do for you through your business page, which isn't an option through your personal profile. So, there are lots of advantages of using a business page to grow your business.
What about cons? What are the disadvantages? Probably the biggest disadvantage of using a business page is this right here. When you create content through your business page, it's unlikely that you're going to get as much reach as you would through your personal profile. You can see this post that I made right here and it got just seven likes and just two comments. Whereas the content that I create through my personal profile often gets hundreds and hundreds of engagements. Well, why is this? The reason is right here. Business pages are intended for business. And you can see that Facebook is trying to give me a little nudge here to get more engagement, to get more reach through this post by boosting this post. And boosting it simply means by paying to get it in front of a larger audience. That's the game that Facebook plays. It says if you're running your business through your business page and you want a lot of people to see your content, you're probably going to have to pay for it, which can work very well, but can also become very expensive. That's one con of using a business page to grow your business.
The second goes back to Messenger. Remember we looked at this conversation here and I said just remember this conversation. So notice that Calypso, this lead here, he messaged me. He instigated the conversation. I didn't reach out to him. And why is that? It's because business pages don't have the ability of starting conversations over in Messenger. I'm going to go back over here to this piece of content. Let's just say that Blaine here, he's a lead and I wanted to reach out to him via my business page. You can see that there's a message option here. So, it looks like I could start a messenger conversation, but doing so is actually using my personal profile. If I were operating as my business page, there would be no option to actually send a message. So, all you can do is create content and then hope that leads are going to message you, that they're going to strike up a conversation, and then you can carry on those conversations and work them towards a sale. This is a huge detractor of using a business page for growing your business. When you create content on your personal profile, an easy way to make sales is simply by reaching out to everyone who engages on that content. You can't do that using a business page.
So, should you be using a business page to grow your business? Well, there's two scenarios when I would say definitely yes. Number one is if you're going to be running a lot of paid for ads, that's really what business pages are set up to do. Inside your Meta Business suite, there's all kinds of tools that they will help you run very specific ads targeting a very specific type of person. And that's great. And then the other instance when you might want to use a business page is if you have a big team and you want your team working on behalf of you on Facebook and then you can assign them a role through your business page and they can take over and use your business page to do whatever it is that their role allows them to do. So if you fall into one of those two buckets, you might want to consider using a business page to run your business.
Just one final note on this. In order to set up a business page, you still need a Facebook profile. You'll remember we said you have to have a profile in order to do anything on Facebook. So you'll be setting up a profile and then from your profile you'll set up a business page. That's how it works.
So we looked at Facebook profiles, we talked about business pages. Now let's talk about Facebook groups. Facebook groups are designed to allow you to build a community around a specific topic. And so as a business owner, you could build a group that's related to your business, getting leads into that group, building a community with those leads, and then selling through your group.
There are many advantages of using a Facebook group. The first is that you can grow a group of any size. There's no cap to the number of members that you can have inside a group. So, here's an example. This group is for marriage and relationships. And you can see that there's 7.5 million members. Imagine if you ran a business that was catering towards married couples. Maybe you offer marriage counseling or some sort of marriage course or a program. You can imagine having 7.5 million members in your group, people who are actively trying to improve their relationships or improve their marriage. These are your ideal leads. So, it's going to be a great place to sell.
And not only that, not only can you get unlimited members into your group, but you can also get really good reach with your posts inside your group. I'm going to go over inside one of my groups here. This one's called audience and influence. And this group is all about online business owners who are using Facebook to grow their businesses. Now, you'll notice down here, this is a list of posts that have been made inside this community, inside this Facebook group recently. And you can see the reach here. Thousands of people are being reached by these posts. And there's no payment going to Facebook. These aren't ads. It's just native posts happening inside the group that are reaching a large percentage of the members inside this group. So, if you have a group and it's about a specific topic and you're posting about that topic inside your group, it's very likely that Facebook is going to show those posts to a lot of the members inside your group. And as those members engage on your content, Facebook's going to show more and more of your content from your group to those members. Makes it a really easy way to nurture those leads and eventually make them an offer so they buy from you.
Groups also have some special tools that are available only inside groups, not in your personal profiles and not on Facebook business pages. And let's take a look at a couple of those tools. The first one is the ability to poll your audience. And so you can see this poll here. This poll is asking members of this group how they feel about having to create more content to engage the Facebook algorithm. And you can see here that I got all these different votes and people are commenting. So, this is a great tool that's only available in Facebook groups where you can ask a question to your audience and get feedback, find out what they're interested in, find out what they're struggling with, find out what they need help with.
Now, related to this, I'm going to show you something down here. I'm going to go down to the comments and let's take a look at all comments. And you're going to see that there's a comment from me on this poll and you can see that it has the @everyone tag. So, I said, "We'd love to hear how you feel about the latest posting recommendations. Thanks for sharing your thoughts @everyone." This @everyone tag allows you to tag all of the members of your group. So basically, this is saying, "Hey, this is a very important post. I would love for you to engage. Take a look at this." And when I use this @everyone tag, Facebook will then send a notification over here in everyone's notifications. So all the members of this group, they're going to get a notification saying, "Hey Dave tagged you on something that's important inside this group." Now, when I say all of the members of your group are going to get a notification, that's not necessarily the case. If you have members of your group who aren't engaged at all and clearly they've showed Facebook that while they join this group, they're just not that interested. Those people may not get a notification. But anyone who's been engaged in your group at all, they've watched videos, they've looked at posts, they've liked things, they've commented, they've engaged with other members. Those people are going to get a notification and they're going to be driven over to your post where you use this @everyone tag. It's a very powerful tool only available inside Facebook groups.
Facebook groups also give you the ability to schedule posts for future dates. So you can see over here I'm again inside the audience and influence Facebook group. And then if you go down in the left-hand side menu, you want to go here to your scheduled posts. And you can see here I've got this post. It's a little testimonial post saying Diana, she used our UniPro software. She made a few tweaks to her sales process and got six new online clients. And so I've got this post scheduled to be posted inside the group at a later date. And so this can be really helpful. You can imagine that you could build out all of your content for the upcoming week or even the upcoming month and then just sit back and relax and your Facebook group will be filled up with your pieces of content engaging your audience and you don't really have to do anything else. It's a really helpful tool.
One last tool that's very helpful inside Facebook groups is to host private events. Here's an example. My wife and I, Lucy, we just hosted this event. It's called Advanced, the Facebook approved content strategy for getting five times more leads from any type of post. And this was a live training that we streamed into our Facebook group that was only available for members of this Facebook group. So, it's very exclusive. It's private. And you can see down here 214 people from the group. They showed up to this event. They were interested. And so you can imagine if you wanted to do as an example like we did a live training that was exclusive that only some people had access to you can run that training in your Facebook group and get a lot of interest in that event. This is a very powerful tool for Facebook groups only.
Two more pros of using a Facebook group to grow your business are this. Number one is you can extract email addresses from people who request to join your group. Again over in the left-hand side menu there's a tab here that's called membership questions. And you can see an example of the questions that I use again in one of my groups. It's called audience and influence. These three questions are presented to everyone who requests to join your group. And you can ask them anything you like. And in this case, you'll see that my third question says basically, what's your email address? And so, as people want to get accepted into this group, they provide their email address. And this email address is moved onto my email list so that I can follow up with these leads via email. Very, very powerful. Not only are you growing the membership of your group, so getting leads into your group where they could be nurtured through that group, but you're also getting their email address so you can nurture those leads by sending out marketing emails.
Now, there is a little bit of technical setup to do this to automatically take these email addresses from people who are requesting to join your group and putting them over onto your email list. I use a tool, it's called UniPro, and you can see over here under Facebook group tools, there's a tool called accept new members. And inside here, you simply sync your Facebook group with whatever email list you want to grow. And then as new leads join your group and they provide their email address, those email addresses are automatically put onto your email list and you can have automated email sequences starting to go out to those members to nurture those leads even faster. And this is a very powerful feature found inside Facebook groups.
One more thing that I do want to mention about Facebook groups is similar to business pages, you can have unlimited people being an admin of your Facebook group. I'll show you over here. I'm inside the members tab of this particular Facebook group. And you can see that this group has four admins and you could add as many admins as you like. So this could be very helpful if you have a team of people maybe who are scheduling content or maybe replying to questions in your group or scanning through comments to make sure members are getting whatever it is that they're asking for from with inside your group.
So those are the pros of running a Facebook group. And you can see I I love Facebook groups. There's so many advantages of growing an audience inside a Facebook group. But there is one major con of running a Facebook group as well. And that con is it's extra work. You can't simply take your content that you post on your personal profile or on your business page and throw it into your group and expect your group to flourish. In fact, that's the reason so many Facebook groups have basically died. I'll show you an example here. This one is for Christian online entrepreneurs. The person who started this group, they started it over 12 years ago. They probably had really good intentions. They grew it to, 500 members, but take a look. There's been no new posts in the last month. No one's joining this group. This group is completely dead. And groups like this that are dead, it's almost always for the same reason. The admin had good intentions when they started the group, but they realized that they had to create more content. They had to build community. They had to they had to really give value to their members in order to encourage their members to start engaging in the group. And that's when the group can take off.
So, if you love creating community, if you like creating content that gets people excited, if you want to build that momentum inside your group knowing that it will take off and run itself at some point down the road, then starting a Facebook group could be an amazing move for you, especially if you have a product or service that requires some nurturing. So, I'll give you an example. Imagine that you're a coach and you're selling higher price coaching. Let's say you have a coaching program that sells for $20,000. It's unlikely that someone's going to see a post that you make through your personal profile or through your business page and you're going to strike up a conversation with them over inside Messenger and instantly they're going to buy. That's unlikely. It's more likely that they're going to see numerous pieces of content from you. It's more likely that they're going to want to engage with you repeatedly before they make that purchase. and having leads go into a Facebook group where they can become nurtured and be part of your community. That can really help you work those leads towards a point where they're comfortable spending thousands of dollars because they want to work with you. They trust you. They want to work with you. They're willing to make that investment with you.
Now, one last thing about Facebook groups. As mentioned before, you do need a personal profile to be on Facebook at all. You can use your personal profile to create a Facebook group. You could also use a business page to create a Facebook group. Just remembering that in order to have a business page, you need a profile. So Facebook groups come later once you have a profile and or a business page. And then one of those two will start your Facebook group.
Now for me, I find a lot of success using a personal profile and Facebook groups to grow my business. But I also have a secret weapon and that secret weapon is UniPro. UniPro is an amazing tool. It goes out onto Facebook. It finds your ideal leads. It brings those leads over into your audience. It grows your Facebook group. It engages your leads. It makes sure your leads see your content and then it helps you make sales at the time that they're ready to buy. UniPro has been a game changer for my business. I know you're going to love it as well. Go over to unipro.com. That's what I got for you in this video all about the difference between Facebook profiles, Facebook business pages, and Facebook groups. If this was helpful, give it a like. If you have any questions about any of the three, leave those below. I'm happy to help out. And again, if you're building your business and you're using Facebook, you got to check out UniPro. Go over to unipro.com. I know you're going to love it. Thanks for checking out this video.