Who Owns Your Business? You May Be Surprised!

I have seen increasing numbers of my Facebook friends promoting their businesses on their personal timelines. It’s against the Facebook Terms to use your personal account to represent something other than yourself, e.g., your business.

If you’re using your account to represent something other than yourself, you could permanently lose access to your account if you don’t convert it to a Page.

Those aren’t my words but a direct quote from Facebook Help.

While you can share posts from your Facebook Page to your personal timeline you still need to be cautious in frequency and quantity. Besides breaking Facebook Terms, you are probably annoying your friends. Instead of using your personal timeline to promote your business, create a Facebook Page. Facebook says that a Page’s purpose is to “build a closer relationship with your audience and customers.” Anyone can create a Facebook Page, but only official representatives can create a Page for an organization, business, brand or public figure.

This doesn’t solve all your problems, however. I’ve heard of major Facebook personalities, e.g., Joel Comm, who have had their accounts closed. If this was their only source of contact with their audience or customers, they would have had serious problems. Smart business owners who are looking to promote their businesses online should own their “storefront.” In this case, I’m not talking about a brick and mortar building but the “real estate” where your store resides on the Internet.

If you only have a Facebook Page or a shop on Etsy, Shopify, WordPress.com, etc., you do NOT own your storefront, the one hosting your page or store owns it. My recommendations for business owners are:

• Register your business domain name(s). Make sure that you are listed as the owner of the domain name and not your web designer or other agent.
• Acquire reliable hosting. The size of your site and the expected daily traffic will dictate what type of hosting you require.
• Build an email list. This list will reside on a service provider’s site, i.e., Aweber, MailChimp, etc., so it will be up to you to export this list regularly.
• Use WordPress as your Content Management System (CMS). Used by more than 25% of all websites, WordPress is easy to use and has a huge support system with tens of thousands of plugins (free and premium pieces of code that extend the functionality of WordPress).
• Research your eCommerce options. What you use for eCommerce will depend upon the types of products, i.e., virtual, digital or physical, and whether you are a distributor, affiliate merchant or original creator.

If you need help with any of these, I’d be glad to provide assistance.