Inside Facebook’s Terms and Conditions, for personal profiles (where you add friends), it states clearly that:
- Your name must be your legal name that can be evidenced by your ID documents
Yet, small business owners are still adding extra words to their name, breaching the Terms and Conditions they signed, in the hope of standing out.
This used to be a ‘popular’ breach years ago – I was writing about it as far back as 2014 – but the practice died down until recently when it has started to become a thing again.
How should you name your Facebook personal profile?
Let’s take my name as an example…
My passport shows my name as,” Veronica Pullen”.
When Facebook temporarily locked my account a few years ago to conduct a random “Fake Name” check – which they regularly do as a safety precaution – I was able to evidence my name and be back into my account within a few minutes, in receipt of an apology for the inconvenience.
However, when they spot check accounts that are breach of their naming conventions, those people will not be so lucky.
I’ve seen these spot checks go two ways over the years:
- Facebook tell the person to edit their name and restore their account.
- Facebook permanently de-activate their account – taking with it admin access to their groups and pages when they are the only admin.
Even option one isn’t always resolved quickly.
It can be days or weeks later that the person is able to log in again.
What you CANNOT add to your Facebook profile name:
Extra letters:
For example, “Veronica Pullen VA” to indicate I am a Virtual Assistant, should that be the case.
Business names:
E.g.: “Veronica Pullen Apples to Oranges” –
Descriptions of what you do:
E.g.: “Veronica Pullen Marketing for Ambiverts”
Leaving aside the fact that they probably don’t know it is a breach, I totally understand why small owners would want to do this.
Facebook is a crowded marketplace, they’re joining groups as themselves, and they want more clients to find them.
By the way, if you read the paragraph above thinking, ‘no, I join groups as my page’, then something to bear in mind is that people TRUST personal profiles a LOT more than pages.
“Anyone” can be behind a page, so you never know who you are engaging with.
Whereas your personal profile is only ever you.
Extra warning: Facebook will instantly lock your personal profile if it detects activity in two separate locations.
Telling them it was your VA logging in will only put you in breach of the “never share your password” rule.
So, please, never ever, ever allow anyone to log into your personal account unless you are sat next to them.
Back to joining groups, you (should) join as your personal profile and use the “Group Profile” to tell ideal clients in the group what you sell.
Group Profiles are unique to every group you join and include space for you to highlight the areas of your business, or specific offers most relevant to the members of that group.
How to set up your “Group Profiles”:
- Navigate to a Facebook group you are already a member of and click on the “Members List”
- Locate yourself at the top of the list
- Select “Edit”
- You have 160 characters to enter your bespoke intro.
- Tick the box if you want to show your business page (it must be listed as your workplace in your personal “About” section first.)
- Tick the box if you wish to show your location (recommended).
- Save and navigate to the next group you want to create a profile for.
Do you want more leads and sales from social media marketing – without having to pay for ads?
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Veronica Pullen
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