The final part of this mini-series looks at the unique cons of both pages and profiles, finishing up with the verdict.

The Cons

With a profile, you are limited to 5,000 friends. At this point, you won't get notifications of any new friend requests and you could end up losing followers and not even know it. This has caused problems with authors in the past and many have switched from a  personal profile to a page because of it.  You can change a profile into a page whenever you want and your existing subscribers and friends will be automatically changed into subscribers. You can’t, however, change a page to a profile.

Facebook determines where content shows up in newsfeeds using an algorithm called Edgerank. This organizes each user’s newsfeed to show the important content at the top. This is determined by the relationship between the user and the poster, by what the content type is and when the content in the post was created. It is quite complicated and it does mean that your posts will be seen by differing audience percentages, depending on whether your content comes from a page or a profile.

According to Facebook, pages are much better than profiles but only if the content is managed properly. If you post content from a profile, it might be more visible or less than that posted from a page and that comes down to how much you and your followers interact with one another.

The Verdict

So, I think its fair to say that both pages and profiles are good options but there are one or two factors that push pages slightly ahead of the profiles.

One of the biggest virtues where social media is concerned is simplicity and pages offer that, with fewer ways for anything to go wrong. You can’t post a private message accidentally so your fans see it and you won't be able to accidentally show off your book release to a select few friends.

Add to that the Facebook Insights and you have a good tool for monitoring your audience, of seeing how they interact and how they approach you and your content; you can use Facebook Insights in conjunction with similar services on other websites to give you an even bigger picture.

What it really boils down to is that Facebook pages have been designed with the business user in mind and, as an author, whether you are up and coming or an old hand, that is what your brand is – a business.

What About Pages for Books?

If you think that setting up a page for each book you release will divide your audience then you would be wrong. If you have sufficient followers and subscribers that like what you do, each of your books is going to have a fan page of its own anyway; it may as well be your page and it may as well be you running it so you can have some control over how it is run.

So there you have it – pages vs profiles. The choice is yours.