Many of my clients are using, or have used their personal Facebook account as a means of promoting their business.
In essence, this is not a bad strategy, especially if you are a solopreneur, or the owner of the business.  It allows you to connect on a personal level with possible customers.
But at the same time, to proactively market your business using your personal Facebook account is not only against Facebook’s terms of service, but it also flies in the face of conventional social media etiquette.
If you have been using your Facebook personal account for business, and now want to switch to using a Facebook Fan page one option is to start a new fan page and start sharing items from the fan page in your personal feed.  You can also ask many of your friends from your personal account to ‘Like’ your business page.  These tactics are all sound ways to build up your fan base.
But if you desire to directly transfer your personal friends to your new Facebook business fan page – this is also possible.
Facebook outlines the process here >> https://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=116067818477568
With this process, you need to create a new Facebook business page and then Facebook will move over all your friends, converting them to ‘Likes’.
But what if you already have started a Facebook business page? Unfortunately I could not find a way to merge your personal friends into an existing Facebook business page.
But you can merge two Facebook business pages.  So go through the above steps to create a new Facebook business page.  Then use these instructions >>https://www.facebook.com/help/?faq=249601088403018#I-have-two-Facebook-Pages-for-the-same-thing.-Can-I-merge-them? to merge the two pages.
One word of warning – the merging keeps the Facebook business page with the most Likes.  So be aware that if your existing Facebook business page has less likes than the new one you created when you converted from a personal account – then you will lose the wall posts, and other page content on your original Facebook business page.
It may be best to trip down your personal account friends list to less than the amount of likes on your Facebook business page (or do an aggressive Like campaign for your existing Facebook business page) so that your existing page has more likes than your new page – so you keep all the page content when merging.
If you need any help with this or other social media strategies – get in touch with me.
