I have 5,000 friends on my Facebook profile.  Facebook has a limit on your personal profile of 5,000.  I reached that limit before Facebook introduced “Fan Pages”.  Now, I have a Fan Page setup as well that I would love to replace my profile.  Why?  Well, you aren’t limited on your Fan Page as to how many fans you can have.

Since my profile is what most people find in search, people keep adding me there.  I can’t add anyone else because my profile is full.  So, I have 2,188 people in wait (as of the date of this blog post).  So, I add these people as those from my current list of 5,000 drop off.  We’re talking about adding one person every three days or so.

Here’s the killer part of this…  I could message these people and say, “Hey! I see you want to connect with me… why don’t you connect up on my fan page?” however Facebook sends me a warning after about the fifth sent message to these individuals.  They also warn that they can close your account down for sending out too many messages.

So… what do I do?

These 2,188 people obviously want to connect with me except I can’t connect back with them.  If I try to communicate with them, I run the risk of Facebook shutting my account down (oh, if they shut your account down and you haven’t appointed a second person on your fan page as administrator, kiss that page goodbye… by the way).

Facebook, why are you holding my people hostage like this?  Has anyone out there found a solution to this?

What I wish Facebook would have done was just convert profiles into fan pages in terms of how they behave.  It would have been very easy to lift the cap on the number of friends, like fan pages, and just let people connect with however many people they want.  Look at Twitter, for example, where some people have hundreds of thousands and even millions of followers.

Or, maybe Facebook could allow us to hide certain profiles in search.  Maybe you can do this already (I haven’t spent too much time looking at the new privacy settings yet) but I think an easy way to say, “Don’t show my profile but rather just my fan page” would be great.

So, anyone out there have any advice on this subject?

All around the social networking universe, people are talking about Facebook fan pages. The reason these are getting more and more highly discussed is because people like myself (and many others) are all reaching or have exceeded the 5,000 friend limit that Facebook inflicts on the Facebook universe. (I am currently sitting at 5,000 with about 200+ friend requests sitting in waiting – when someone drops off, I friend the next one in line).

In needing to find an alternative for people who want to friend me, I’ve just today (January 6, 2009) started my first ever Facebook fan page. You can check it out here.

Here’s what I’ve learned in the process…

• Facebook pages are easy to create. The entire process took me less than thirty minutes and I now have a secondary place for people to “friend” me on Facebook.
• You can add video, events and discussions to your fan page. This keeps the level of interaction one might expect to see on a profile page up. Doesn’t feel like you’re missing much this way!
• There are no caps on the number of fans you might have on Facebook. This is also good for those of you (us) who reach 5,000 and want someplace for people to go after that!

So, please feel free to visit the new Facebook fan page and fan me if you wish!

Also, here’s a video from Mari Smith of Why Facebook? on how to create and find Facebook fan pages.

[tags]BSETC, Erin Blaskie, Facebook, Facebook fan page, Facebook fan pages, fan pages, internet marketing, internet marketing support, internet marketing strategy, internet marketing implementation[/tags]