When small businesses first started to market on Facebook, many business owners used their own personal account to broadcast their message to the masses. This was fine. You connected with a person who shared not only personal thoughts and stories, but something about their business. A little later, people started to get creative and create accounts for their business. This meant you became “friends” with a hotel, a bar, or a local plumbing service. This was so-so, but not really the best way to do it. Along came the growth of Facebook fan pages. This is where it is at for businesses to really execute and build awareness to a Facebook community. Simply put here are five strong reasons that accounts need to be actual people with real stories, and administrate and reference business ideas and information on their fan pages:

1. Like we said, Fan pages can be managed by one or more accounts. It means you log in with one account and can go manage several fan pages while logged in as that person. Too much? You can add other administrators as well to help, without having to worry about sharing accounts, or passwords.

2. Fan pages are a one-way relationship. The entity exists whether you have 5 fans, 500, or 5,000. Do you really want to be in the business of having to accept all those requests as a friend request one by one?

3. Fan pages have metrics. It shows you demographics of your fan base, trends of adds, drops, interactions, and article effectiveness. None of this is available on personal account pages.

4. You can always suggest the page to fellow Facebook friends, or post links on Twitter, Linked In, or in your email marketing. Potential fans can visit the page and instantly decide if they want to subscribe or not without waiting for a friend request to be accepted.

5. Separation of business and personal information. Fans of your business might not want every nook and cranny detail of your life, just your business or information on your industry. Or maybe your friends just like you as a friend and not about your business. It allows your friends to be social, your fans to connect with your business, and those that want both, to hear both sides of the story.

Hope you find this helpful. We’d love to hear your comments and thoughts on how you use Facebook to manage content for a business, or how you use that information as a consumer perhaps.

Our January Tweetup will be on Southside Bethlehem on January 14, 2010.  Starting at 6pm, we will be at Home and Planet (25 East 3rd Street, Bethlehem, PA 18015) for a wine and cheese mixer.  At 7pm, we’ll brave the cold and muster over to The Bookstore (336 Adams Street, Bethlehem, PA 18015) from 7-9pm.

RSVP on Twtvite!