This is BIG news! Now you can convert your personal Facebook profile to a page. Raise your hand if you have had to try to manually move thousands of friends to a page. I have two clients who are in the midst of dong that right now. If you already have a page keep in mind you can’t merge pages, so you may end up with two pages. But I would rather move a couple hundred fans from one page to another than move 5000 friends from a profile to a page.

Want to give it a try just click here.

We see this all the time when we start working with bands: they’ve got started on Facebook, but they never fully researched all the options and set up a “profile” instead of a “page.”

If you don’t know the difference between the two; a profile is meant for ordinary people to add friends, share pics and comments. A page is meant for businesses, band, authors and public figures to communicate with their audiences.

There are a huge number of advantages to setting up a Page instead of a Profile (not least because using a profile for a band is against Facebooks Terms!).

It’s often painful to see a band having built up one or two thousand friends on a profile, only to have to start from scratch with a new page. You have very limited options here – you can spam the newsfeed and send individual message to each friend urging them to “like” your new page. It’s time consuming (believe me!) and not very effective.

But now Facebook are giving us the ability to convert a personal profile to a page. This lets you keep ALL your friends (as fans) and your pictures, but the rest of your data has to be re-entered.

If you have a page you want to convert, just click here to begin the process.

Our first reaction to this news was delight – this will be a HUGE time saver for any band that made the simple mistake of building a profile instead of a page.

Scammable?

However, after a while it dawned on us that this has another potential use. As all musicians know, growing a Fanbase on Facebook is hard work. It takes regular updates, competitions, promotions and even advertising.

But this update offers a new back door approach:

If you’ve just set up a band, why not create a personal profile, start adding people until you get 4,000-5,000 friends (5k is the max) then migrate to a page with 5,000 fans.

Is it spammy? Absolutely. Could it be effective? Probably. Am I recommending it? I’m not sure.

On the whole, the quality of fans you start with might not be high enough to warrant the investment of time. On the other hand, starting a page with a few thousand fans is a huge boost for a new band.

What do you think? If you were starting your Facebook page today would you consider taking this approach?

via Big News : How To Convert Personal Facebook Profiles to Pages – Amp Music Marketing.