Learn how to transition your Facebook profile’s friends to fans of your page through a meticulous seven-step process, enhancing your business’s social presence.

Key Takeaways:

  • Convert Facebook profile to a page and merge with an existing page for broader reach.
  • Expect an increase in unsubscribe rates during the transition period.
  • Essential steps include backing up your profile, changing admin roles for owned pages/groups, and renaming your profile for a seamless merge.
  • Monitor and nurture page engagement post-merge to rebuild EdgeRank and minimize unsubscribes.

Steps To Add Your Profile’s Friends As Your Page’s Fans

One of the neatest, but most step-intensive, processes available to Business Owners on Facebook is the process of “rolling” a profile into an existing page.

There’s lots of reasons this can be useful. For me, I did it because I was making huge changes to how I used my profile and did not simply want to dump all of the connections entirely.

It is worth noting that this will result, after a few days of settling in a multi-week increase in unsubscribes from your page. (Not every friend WANTS to be “just a fan”.) So when you see your unsubscribe rates jump in Facebook Insights you know why.

I suggest bookmarking this page and keeping it handy as you work through all seven steps below! (You could even plus, tweet, like and share it while you’re at it if you’re feeling kind!)

I also suggest reading through the details of each of these steps before starting any of them. (Particularly be aware of the bugs with the merge tool.)

How To Merge A Facebook Profile With An Existing Facebook Page

First: Backup Your Profile (However, you won’t get to take the contents, except the friends/fans, to the new page. This is just for your records.)

Second: Give all Pages & Groups you own another admin/owner. Because your profile is going away, it will not be able to own these items and if they do not have another admin/owner they vanish or fall into limbo. (Get a friend to help you.)

Third: Rename your profile to your desired page name. This will not work in all instances as Facebook has some filters but in many cases it will be helpful. (Particularly if you are using the page merge technique next.) There is no rename as part of the migration.

Fourth: Migrate your Profile to a Page, paying careful attention to rename it to match your existing page name BEFORE you convert it. The renaming step is important as an exact-match name is required.

Fifth: Merge your new page and old page using the merge option that is on the page with the vanity URL you wish to keep. Do not perform this from the wrong copy of the page or you will lose the better of the two vanity URLs.

Sixth: Try not to freak out for the next 24-48 hours while your fan count is very wrong (often zero) as this process gets a manual check by Facebook and it will be a bit before it is right.

Seventh: Spend the next two weeks “babying” the page, working to build EdgeRank (which has now become very diluted) and re-build engagement levels. Pay attention to unsubscribes (which will spike) and hides (again will spike) and to really observing proper care and feeding of the page.

This is the exact process I went through to convert my old Profile into a Page and then merge that new Page into my existing Page.

Note: If you intend to create a new profile, you’ll need to use a different email address. After that, transfer ownership of the Pages to your new account. Then, remove the old account from the pages and delete the old account. (Keep in mind, you can’t have two accounts according to Facebook’s Terms of Service.)

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