Facebook will now allow you to change your “profile” into a page!
As you may know, Facebook “profiles” are for individual people. “Pages” are for businesses and organizations.
Having a profile for anything other than an individual person is a violation of Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities. If you don’t convert your profile to a Page, you risk permanently losing access to the profile and all of your content. This means they can delete your profile, at any time, without warning, for being in violation–even if you aren’t doing anything “wrong.” It happened to a rescue in Oklahoma just last month.
But NOW, if you accidentally set up your Facebook presence as a “profile,” you can switch it over easily, AND all your “friends” will automatically become “fans”!! Pretty exciting.
So, here is what you need to know, because (as with all things Facebook) it’s definitely possible to mess this up!
What will transfer over?
Right now, ALL your friends will become fans, and it will keep your same profile picture. That’s IT. So if you have notes, photos, videos, etc. it will NOT copy those over–UNLESS you do a couple extra steps, which I’m going to outline for you below.
Is it permanent? Can you switch back?
Yes, it’s permanent. No, you can’t switch back.
So how do you do it?
If you have extra content on your profile, like notes and other photos (besides your profile photo), you can easily download this to your computer, and then re-upload it once you convert your profile to a page. So you have to save this information first. If you just recently created your profile, you don’t need to worry about this.
To do this, Watch the video below or follow these steps:
- Click on Account Settings (upper right corner).
- Click on “learn more” next to “Download Your Information.”
- Click on “Download.”
- They will send you an email with a link to download the file when it’s ready.
DO NOT start converting your profile to a page until you’ve downloaded that file!!
So, if you’re ready to convert your profile to a page, click here to start. (the link will open in a new window so you can still see the instructions here)
Are you not sure what kind of page you need to create? Watch this video to understand what kind of Facebook page is right for you.
BE SURE you are logged in to the account that you want to convert! If you maintain your own personal account, plus one for your shelter, be sure you’re logged into the right account, because there’s no going back.
This account you’re logged into will become a Facebook “Business Account,” and will be the admin for the new page that it’s creating. So now you an add other people as admins to your page. It’s really important to have other people as admins on your page, age least one other person, just in case something happens to you. So make sure you set up some other admins on the page!
If you’re having trouble, comment below or on my Facebook page, and I’ll be glad to help!
Emily Garman is COO of 
Great article thanks! Wish they had done this a long time ago. Do you know whether FB retains your developer Apps information once you convert your profile to a business account? We’ve got several apps on our website and wouldn’t want to lose them.
Jane, this is a fantastic question! I wasn’t sure of the answer right off the bat, so I did a little research. Since a “page” can’t be the admin on an app, you are right–you would lose the ability to control your apps. However, the apps won’t go away or disappear. So there’s an easy way around this.
You just need to make sure that at least one other profile (i.e. a person) is an admin on your app. (This is just a good practice anyway, for a variety of reasons!) It can be your own personal account, someone else in your organization–someone you trust and whose account you will be able to access if you need to modify the app. So that would probably be your own, or whoever works on your Facebook apps.
Just go into your application settings (access it via https://www.facebook.com/developers/), click on your app, click “edit settings,” and then scroll down to the bottom. (See a screenshot here for how to add an admin to your Facebook app)
The account you login as to do this (which is your “profile” that you’re wanting to change to a page) needs to be Facebook friends with this person. If that’s the case, then just start typing their name in that box, and it will automatically add them as an admin to the app.
Again, thanks for bringing this up! So many things to consider before you make this conversion!
Many thanks. Have been thinking about this all weekend, but only just had the chance to login to see if you had replied. I was thinking I would need to set myself up as an admin on the app. (so great to have confirmation). At the moment we can post on our comments app here http://www.dorsetwildlifetrust.org.uk/raptorcam.html (see commenting app on right hand side) and can comment as “Dorset Wildlife Trust” (I tend to untick the comment, so it doesn’t go on our profile). I’m presuming once we convert this to a page I’ll lose this facility and will only be able to comment as myself. Really need the apps to work with pages, or maybe they do and I’m just not aware of it.
Hi there, thanks for posting this! I literally just found out that it was a violation so this is very relieving to find. Quick question – is it as simple as uploading the FB file to your new page? Thanks
Thanks for this great info!
We currently have a profile and a page (grrrr). Do you know if it’s possible to merge our profile into our existing page? And rather than being a “business” account, can it transfer to a “non-profit” account?
Do you know of a way to convert a Facebook ‘group’ to a Facebook ‘page’?
Thanks
Thanks so much for this post. I got as far as converting my profile to a page. What do I do with all the information I downloaded? It’s nearly 5MB. (I had that profile long before the pages were available.) Also I seem to have created two pages, one with 4 fans and the other has the rest of my friends. Any idea what that’s about?
Help! I just did this conversion. Thanks so much for the information. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to upload the old information onto the old page. Thanks for any guidance you can share. -Kim
Ok, from what I’ve found, Facebook wanted us to download that stuff because it was going to get lost in the conversion. It’s like an archive of your facebook profile. There is no way to upload it to the new page.
It took hours out of my day to save stuff I can’t reuse. I’m a bit annoyed. Someone please tell me I’m wrong about this.
Hi Ellen-Mary, Sorry; I was tied up all day and didn’t get a chance to respond until now. So you are right–what you’ve downloaded is an archive. it is all your pictures, videos, notes, etc. that were on your “profile.” so once you create your new page (convert that profile into a page), you DO have to manually upload all that stuff. So you need to unZIP the file you downloaded, and you’ll see your photos and videos and stuff. But unfortunately, there’s no “one-click” upload to magically put it back where it goes on your new page.
I don’t know why Facebook can’t offer that functionality…perhaps they will someday. But for now, I still believe this is a good thing to do, BECAUSE, if your business “profile” is revoked/taken down by Facebook, you won’t get any warning–and then you’d lose everything anyway, with no backup file at all. And you’d then have to start over and create a new “page” from scratch. At least this way, you’ve created your new page, but you have some content to bring over.
It’s not perfect…I’m sorry you’re annoyed. I agree…it IS a bit annoying! But you can use it, you just have to upload the items manually. Let me know if you have specific questions; maybe I can help further! Good luck!!
Emily
Hi Kim,
it sounds like you are facing the same problem as Ellen-Mary. So you have your ZIP file that Facebook emailed you to download, right? The one containing your content from your profile? So are you able to open that file? If you use Windows, you should be able to right-click on the file and choose “open” and it will “un-zip” the file into a folder of your choice on your desktop or somewhere. So once you see inside that ZIP file, you’ll see pictures, videos, notes and other types of files that were on your Facebook profile. So all you have to do now is upload those items to your new Page.
It’s a bit of a pain in the neck, I agree. There’s no way to automatically import all the stuff with the click of a button, unfortunately. it really stinks! But, like I said to Ellen-Mary, it’s better than having your profile deleted by Facebook, and having NONE of your content from your profile.
I’m going to make a video tonight and walk everyone through the process.
Hi Edwin,
I have not heard of any way to do that–I just did another Google search to see if any new developments had been made and I didn’t see anything on the Facebook developers forums, either. Right now it looks like you can just convert a Profile into a Page.
But you know, Facebook changes stuff ALL THE TIME, so who knows–tomorrow it may be a different story! I’ll be sure to post here when/if that happens and let everyone know!
Emily
Hi Jennifer,
This is a common and vexing problem! I feel your pain, believe me. So there is no way, unfortunately, to “combine” two pages (here’s a blog post I did about combining a profile and a page).
I CAN answer your second question with good news, though! Once you create a page (whether by conversion or just creating it from scratch), you can always change the “type” of page it is–business, nonprofit, retail store, church, etc. There are lots of kinds of pages and you can switch back and forth between them as much as you want–it makes no difference to your page and how your users interact with it. One thing you can NOT change, though, is the page name/title. so be sure to choose that wisely when you create your page.
Hope that helps! I’m going to do another video tonight about all this since it seems there is really still a lot of confusion about it!
Hi RT,
Check the replies to other comments here–you have to unZIP the file that Facebook sends and get the individual files out of it; there will be photos, videos, notes, etc. So you’ll have to upload those manually. Good luck!!
Thanks for the info! One question, what if we already have a page set up (although undeveloped as of yet) that we want to use as the destination page for this conversion? Is that possible or do we need to start over by creating a new page for the purpose of converting our info and our friends becoming fans?
Thanks
Hey everybody–here are three more videos giving you the next pieces of the puzzle. Learn how to get your data out of Facebook, how to convert your page and then what to do with that ZIP file! http://www.thesocialanimal.com/social-media/how-to-convert-your-facebook-profile-into-a-page-and-what-to-do-then
Hey Jeff, here is the post that talks about doing what you are needing to do: http://www.thesocialanimal.com/social-media/convert-facebook-profile-page-exists Thanks!
THANK YOU!!!!!
There is something really weird about this new page – it keeps coming up to a page about FB ads whenever I sign it. Why is that? Also, I now do not see any of the postings of my friends/followers. Is this a setting issue? Thanks for clarifying!
Really appreciate this information. I’d be devastated if we suddenly lost our FB page. It is our main means of communication with 1400 friends.
-Kim
Hi Kim,
OK–so I’m not sure why are seeing a page about Facebook ads. Probably because since it converted your profile to a page, now when you log on to Facebook, you don’t have all the things available to you that you do when you login as yourself–because you don’t have a “profile” any longer. So a “business account” on facebook only exists to maintain that one page. That’s it. So they are probably just trying to sell you some ads! You should be able to click past it and just get to your page.
So you’re not seeing posts from your friends and followers because the PAGE doesn’t have “friends.” Remember, you switched to a page, and pages don’t have friends. So because you’re logged in as your page, right now you don’t have any “likes.” A page can “like” other pages, but you can’t be “friends” with people. See what I mean? You as a “profile” can be “friends” with other people (“profiles”) but you can’t do that as a page. So when you manage a page in this way (with a business account, and not through a personal account), you really get a very lopsided experience of Facebook.
So the solution is that you, as a “person” (your own personal account) need to be an admin on your Facebook page. You should add anyone else who regularly makes updates to your page as well. This way you can see what other people are saying (outside of your FB page’s wall) and interact. The best way to do that is to use Facebook “as” your page: comment on other pages, “like” other pages, interact in that way. And of course, you can post status updates, links, pictures, videos, etc. that your Fans (remember, they aren’t “friends” anymore!) will comment on, and you can interact with them this way. Here’s information on how to add admins to your Facebook page.
It SEEMS like a more one-sided conversation when you have a page rather than a profile, but it’s really not. You don’t want to be a “person” anyway, as your organization–you need to be represented professionally on Facebook.
Once you “like” some pages on behalf of your page, then you’ll see those pages in your status updates/news feed area, like you used to see all the posts from your “friends.” Here’s information on how to use Facebook “as” your page.
Hope this helps!
*ulp*
I downloaded all the important information from my profile.
I clicked on the transfer profile to page.
It changed.
It now says I have NO likes?
Please tell me it takes a little while for the friends to transfer over to being likes? I had a list of 700+ plus and now there’s 0.
Hi Aram,
Yeah, I mentioned this in the video. It can take a day or so for all the fans to appear; you’ll see the “countup” starting pretty soon. Facebook has to change all the info in those peoples’ accounts, so it just takes a little while. Never fear, they will appear!
Thanks so much! I really appreciate the guidance.
This whole thing is making me feel so old.
My intern is working on it now and making it work better. I was very spoiled with the profile option.
Thank you!
-Kim
This was great info. Now I have a twist to this. I want to delete the account I downloaded this info on, and upload to another Facebook…how do I do that?
Hi Wendy Sue, yes, of course you can do that. When you download the info from your old facebook profile (the one you want to delete), you get a ZIP file that contains your pictures, videos, notes, etc. so what you can do (once that data is safely in hand!), is upload that to your new page (or an existing page). You do not have to convert your “profile” into a new page–you can just delete it.
So if you already have a page for your organization, great–just upload the content there, and delete your profile.
Does that make sense? Let me know if not and I’ll explain differently!
Is there an easier way to upload all your information than doing each album etc. individually?
No, unfortunately not at this time. I try to look on the bright side…at least we get to convert the friends into fans, and keep all the data! But re-uploading everything is a bit of a pain.
Hi! Quick question! If I have a profile account AND a fan page, what will happen when I want to change the Profile account to another? Fan Page?
Thank you!
If you do that, then you’ll have two Facebook Pages. You could then merge those two fan pages into one, if you wish–or you could just have two fan pages.
Keep in mind that if your existing fan page has only one admin–the profile you are about to convert–then you should assign another admin to that page BEFORE you convert your profile, otherwise your fan page will be an “orphan.” it won’t have any admins (because your profile will no longer exist as the admin after you convert it to its own page). Hope that makes sense!
I have a quick question. Why is it that my facebook page no longer has a search bar? It will occasionally occur when i am under edit page but still it is rare? Also, how can my page like other pages?
Hi Kassi,
The search bar is just one of the things that Facebook has moved in one of its many Facelifts! You will always see the search bar at the very top of your page, above the content. It will be at the very top of your browser window in the blue header area.
As for your page “liking” other pages, see this post for how to interact on Facebook “as” your page. Good luck!
Thanks ill have to check out that post. But i was wondering if it was a browser problem or if it was not there for pages but within the last two weeks the search bar is not there in the blue area? SO there was no way for me to even search anything else? Didnt know if you had any suggestions or have heard of that happening?
Thanks!
Ok i watched the video and we are a non profit org… We have three different pages but we dont have a profile or personal page e.g. when you switched from Emily? Does that matter? We can maybe attach one of the staff’s personal page with this so that we can like other pages but when i use FB as HCCF i still cant like anything else?
Sorry i just sent so many in a row but when i logged on to Facebook i realized that we dont even have an Account option we just have Setting and Log out? We have been having major problems with our page we originally had a profile and we converted it and then deleted it because our pages were still working without it?
OK–can you tell me what the URL of your page is, and I will check it out? I need to see what you’re talking about. I think what may have happened–this is my guess so far–is that you created these other pages under your profile account. So you had a profile in the name of your organization, and you used that profile to create those pages. then when you deleted that profile, your pages didn’t have an administrator anymore, because that profile was probably the only admin on those pages–you should have at least two admins on every page. So what’s happening now is you may not be able to edit those pages, and you don’t see your “account” tab because you’re not logged in under a profile, you’re just looking at the page and there’s no admin. Let me know what your page URL is and I’ll take a look.
Yeah you were exactly right! i we still could log in but our “Person” was the profile that we deleted and when i clicked on the picture under the admins it said that the page didnt exist so i went under my personal profile and made myself an administrator and deleted the old admin and i believe that fixed the problem!
Thanks!
I had a profile page with only a handful of “friends”. I had a fan page that I mainly used in conjunction of my Blog. So I thought migrating my personal page to my fan page would omit the personal page. When I migrated, I loss access in being able to comment and interact on my fan page. What happened??
I think somebody may have touched on this. But I’m worried about deleting anything in case it will be deleted for good!
I made a fan/business page for work, and for some reason I thought I had to make the profile they offer you with it. Now every time I sign in to my business page I have to manually switch it from this profile that I don’t care about.
I want to go into privacy and click “delete facebook profile” …
But if I do, does that mean the business page goes away too? Because I don’t want to do it then, I’ve already gotten fans etc.
Sorry this is lengthy but one more thing.
I tried to make someone an admin on the business page just in case I deleted the profile and lost everything.
But it won’t let me make this person an admin even though they are a fan!
HELP!
My organisation had both a profile page and a fan page. More friends on the profile than fans. I wanted to merge the accounts, but ended up just turning the friend page into a fan page, thus losing the friend page as administrator. (Not my intended goal!)
I have since added other administrators to regain most functionality on FB, but problems still remain! I would like to change the email address that FB uses for the fan page, but I can no longer access this function since the new administrator uses a different email address than the original page. Does that make sense? There is no settings tab for the fan page. I can change anything I like on the administrator’s page but am now quite limited on the fan page. It would be nice if I had never converted the profile into a fan page! Now that the friend page is a fan page, I can no longer communicate directly with ‘friends’ to ask them to move over to the fan page.
Another problem is that I now have two fan pages for one organisation! I know there is no way to merge them, but do you have any other ideas? I might just lose the fans on one page altogether.
Please help if you can!
LJ
Hi Melanie,
This should not have happened. Converting your profile to a page indeed would have omitted your personal profile, because now it’s a page instead of a profile. Did you nave another fan page, and that’s what you’re talking about? Maybe tell me your URLs and I can take a look. If you have TWO pages, now, what may have happened is that the account that you converted from a profile to a page got deleted (which is normal and expected when you converted it to a page), and it was the only admin on your page, so now you can’t do anything with that page. That may be what happened. I’d like to take a look if you still need some help!
Hi Morgan,
If you do delete that profile (the one that created the page) then yes, you will have a big problem–because you will have a page with no admins! So what you need to do is add someone else (maybe your own personal account, your boss, another person in your office, etc.) as an admin on that page. Then, once you delete the profile you want to delete, there will be no problem; you’ll be able to continue on with your new page!
As for the person you need to make an admin–yes, they have to be a fan, so that’s the first step. You don’t need to be their “friend” to add them as an admin. Are you sure you have their correct email address? For example, I use a different email on Facebook than I do in other places. Make sure you have the correct email address. It may not work if you just enter their name (especially if you are not “friends” with this person), so you’ll have to enter their Facebook email address. Try that and see if it works.
Hi there,
Do you know if it is possible to reuse the username you had for your profile after converting to the page? Or is that username lost and can never be user again?
Thank you very much!
Hello Henrik,
What it should do is use the SAME name for your new page as it did for your profile. In fact, when you do the conversion, it won’t really let you choose a name that is different from your profile. For example, if your profile was “BenandJerrys Icecream”, then you’d have to make your new page named “Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream,” pretty much. In my experience, if a user name is “in use” and then the person deletes their account, or something like that, then that user name would EVENTUALLY become available again–but no telling how long before it cycles back into availability.
So after downloading the data and converting the page, how do you re-upload that data to reappear on the site?
Hi Adam,
You’ll need to unZIP the file that you downloaded. That contains all your photos, videos, notes, etc. and you’ll have to upload those manually to your “new” page. It only converts over your friends into fans–it doesn’t convert your content. So while this is a bit of a pain, it’s still really awesome to be able to keep all our “friends” as fans!
Hi Emily:
So our situation is, a student created our Facebook page this summer. It is a true page. That’s great. But she created a new profile just for this page. Now 3 of us log into that profile to admin the page. My sister works for an academic institution. She told me that we shouldn’t have to go through this personal profile to manage our page. She stated their page is just accessed through the login and the admins go straight to the page. I researched FB and it doesn’t sound like I can do that. Rather, it states we can manage our page with a business account. Ok. But how do we switch the current profile to a business account without creating a new page? And, do we really want to do that? All of our “fans” are liking our page – they aren’t confused and none of them are liking our profile. If they did, we would just message them to go to the page itself. Finally, I didn’t want any of us to be admins from our personal profiles because any of us could leave the organization at any time. But I see you actually recommend that in the posts above.
What do you recommend given our situation?
Hi Jill,
I DO recommend that because that is how Facebook wants you to do it–they want all pages to be administered by actual people. So what your student did was create a “fake” person (the profile you mentioned) to be the admin of the page. What your sister described is what many businesses do, who don’t want to have anything to do with Facebook other than have a presence there (i.e., they don’t want to be on Facebook personally). So that can work, too–but since you have already set up your page, that is going to be tricky to get back to.
If you delete this fake profile, then your page may be stuck without any admins. NOT good. If you make yourself and your coworkers admins on the page, then you can admin the page through your own logins, and delete that profile–but then you’ll be personally admins on the page, which you said you don’t want. True, any of you could leave the organization at any time–but if that happens, then you can just remove that person as an admin from the page. Your personal profiles are in no way visibly or publicly associated with your page. So no one can see this and say “Jill is an admin on this page!” If that helps any.
Here is what I THINK will happen if you delete your fake profile. you’ll still be able to login to Facebook with the email address (whichever one you used to set up that account), and it will just go straight to your page–you won’t see any profile or home screen or anything like that like you see now when you use Facebook as a “person.”
That’s what I THINK will happen. But what might also happen is that your page is left an orphan, with NO admins. So what I would do in CASE that happens, is temporarily make yourself (with your own personal profile) an admin on your page. then delete the fake profile, see what happens. If all is well, then you can just remove yourself as an admin on the page, leaving only the email address login.
Does that make sense? I know it’s a little bit crazy!!!
Hi Emily:
Wow, thanks for the fast response :>).
Ok. I’m with you, a little bugged I can’t get back to a business account but I’m thinking do we really want that?
Here’s another wrinkle: we may want to add more pages in the future, 1 for our Garden Program and 1 for a local chapter. We would want the pages to be tied to at least 1 profile or business account that was the same for organizational consistency and, of course, all the pages would “like” each other.
Given that, should we keep the new profile and tie all the pages to that even if they have different personal admins? Or, just have personal admins for each page and just try to make sure 1 person is an admin for all?
OR, can you have multiple pages with a business account? If yes, even if its tricky, how could we get to a business account with the page we have now?
Even if we do this with a business account, we’d still add personal admins because I understand your points above.
Thanks.
Jill
Dear Emily…. Recently, while helping someone else do a profile to page converstion, I got into some major problems, and was wondering if you could give me some guidance.
Basically, an associate of mine had developed a personal profile for his business (Haunted Empire) which as we know is against the rules.. Along the way, he additionaly developed a Haunted Empire page, of which the Haunted Empire profile was the only Admin… At the time I came on board, the profile had about 180 friends and the page only had 4 likes, so I suggested that we delete the page with 4 likes and convert the profile to a bonifide business account/page as your article says… This person gave me the login and password information for the account and, after logging in, I accepted some friend requests that were queued up and deleted the unwanted page. I began the conversion and was through the end of the interview dialog and pressed “submit.” A general error occurred indicating that I should try again later. The next time I logged into the account, I received a notification that the account was disabled and it suggested I log in from the computer I “normally would” (or something like that, or alternatively gave instructions for uploading photo ID. I uploaded my own ID information (since there is no one whose name is “Haunted Empire”) and through the complaints page, I wrote a nice letter to Facebook explaining what I was trying to do. This all happened about 6 days ago and I haven’t heard anything from them yet.. I haven’t tried to have the original account owner log into it from his computer yet, but I guess I need to swallow my pride and do that…
So my first question is: What would you do in the same circumstances?
Also… Now that this has happened to me, I would like to see Facebook develop a “Trusted Agent” program where a person like myself (who is an Admin for several pages and often act on behalf of other people) can have an elevated log-in method so that in instances like this, Facebook will allow me to perform functions they wouldn’t let an average user do, because I have proven that I am a “trusted agent.”
The bottom line is that I am very discouraged because I love the capabilities of Facebook and how it can help people and businesses promote themselves, and I was in the middle of correcting a Facebook usage violation, and have been able to get no satisfaction in this lock out situation… I feel that I have unfairly been made to look incompetent in the eyes of my client because I am powerless to actually reach out to a person at Facebook and work through this..
Thanks,
Andy
Thanks for the informative post. I recently got a new job and I have been trying to migrate our page from an individual profile to a page. I keep getting locked out of the account and asked to identify our “friends” (about 400 former students, I do not know). With help from a student worker I was able to perform the account verification and tried to migrate again and got locked out a second time! What is going on? Is there any way to contact facebook or anyone about how to rectify this situation?
Thanks for very useful information!
Here is my situation:
When I was created personal profile I created business page as a personal profile and now I know that is “violation of Facebook’s Statement of Rights & Responsibilities”. I also created one page under my personal profile. Now I want to keep that page and delete personal profile.
Is this my solution?:
First I will have to convert my facebook profile into a facebook page. I guess I will then have two pages? After that, Can I delete the new page that does not have likes and keep my existing page with likes?
Thanks,
Petar