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?