Facebook makes changes and is updating its user interface to keep up with the trends and growing needs of social networks. As part of those changes, Facebook introduced business and group pages in addition to personal profile pages.

What is a profile page?

When you sign up, the first thing you have to do is create a personal profile page. This page represents you as an individual person.

Here are some of the features of a profile page:

Represents an individual person
The main goal is connection with friends.
Limited to 5,000 friends
Friends need to be approved.
The visibility of the page and its parts can be regulated by the privacy settings
Personal status updates appear on your wall along with your friends’ posts on your wall
A person typically has only one personal profile page

What is a fan page?

Facebook Pages allow public individuals, businesses, organizations, and other entities (for example, a band) to create a public presence on Facebook. These pages are public by default and anyone can become a fan by clicking the “Like” button at the top of the page.

These are the characteristics of a fan or business page, which will highlight the differences with the profile page:

Represents a public person, company or other entities
The main goal is to create a platform to publish content for anyone who follows
Unlimited to the number of followers.
· No need to approve fans or followers – anyone can ‘like’ and follow posts, updates, news, etc.
By default, visibility is public to everyone on the Internet.
Status updates are divided into 3 categories (like 3 different walls): the page’s own updates, others and both together. This allows viewers to order updates.

The page’s own updates appear on the wall, for others you have to change the tab
Any page is created and managed through a personal account.
· One person can manage multiple fan pages

Advantages of a fan page

If you want to create a platform to showcase your business, you definitely want to create a fan page. The advantages are numerous:

· Your friends will see the fan pages you just followed and could share them with their friends; thus one page advertising becomes bigger than just your circle of friends
Followers are not limited as in personal profiles.
Followers do not need to be approved

I have personally created multiple business pages for my own businesses and other people’s organizations. One of the pages I’ve created showed me the ability to reach beyond anything we can imagine: in 18 months there were over 15,000 people following this particular page, just by word of mouth from a Facebook friend to a friend. without me promoting it at all!