GREAT great great post. I literally just gave a presentation on this very topic last week, providing local businesses with an idea of why they need fan pages as opposed to personal pages. I am also going to be investigating some of the tools you mention for auto-posting material, and I really try to emphasize that the fan page should be social and not just promotional. 
 
Great information, thanks!

Great points, lots of stuff that people need to be reminded of, especially if they aren't used to or in tune with current best practices for social media marketing on Facebook. Our agency Facebook page (http://www.facebook.com/FirstTracksMarketing) is where I like to link all of our ongoing blog postings AND post fun and interesting links and thoughts that I come across during the week. It helps to keep things light and I like to be able to share those things with our fans and the people who find us interesting and fun. 
 
Good post.

Dan, is your book out? How can we get a copy?

Very interesting and informative article. Right on target.

Thanks for the info...I've been looking for validation of these points for awhile now, so it was really helpful.

In reference to the video: Advertizing does work, social media just works MUCH better.  
 
And for sure that is the ONE best piece of information you could tell any business on Facebook! Thanks for sharing!

The challenge for brands, especially restaurants and bars, you cannot tag a fan page. So if I'm a fan of a bar, and we take photos there, and I want to tag the bar, I cannot, unless they have a personal page. The same is true of charities, which prevents charities from reaping the full exposure FB could bring. I'm confident that is the driving reason many brands and organizations make a conscious choice to create an individual page vs. a fan page, or they create both.

You know it is actually beginning to annoy me when I see companies or brands creating profiles. And then they use them to market and it gets even more annoying. I was expecting to write about this soon myself.  
 
I would argue against your last statement in that most people creating profiles for their brands aren't thinking about the limitations of pages such as inability to tag photos like you describe. They likely do not understand Facebook to enough extent to be thinking of such a minuscule detail like that.

As a company, we started out with a "profile" because we have a brand persona (Ask Ana), who we sent the account up for. Now we have both a profile and a page, but I was worried about ending our profile because we have so many more people on it, and keep getting requests every day. Would you have SPECIFIC resources as to how to contact Facebook and ask them to merge the contacts over to our Business Page? Thanks!

One of the first corporate pages I ever checked out on Facebook was Wal-Mart's (this was at least a couple of years ago). It was a back-to-school promo for decorating your dorm. Unfortunately for Wal-Mart, on their wall was just a long string of posts of people arguing whether or not Wal-Mart was an evil empire. Lesson learned!

Ryan, I'm going to respectfully disagree with your assertion that most businesses do not know enough about facebook to understand the minuscule details about photo tagging, etc. I know you're right about some businesses, but I'm specifically referencing very social media savvy companies who decided to set up individual pages as a work-around, because of the tagging issue specifically. AJ Bombers in Milwaukee did a whole campaign using tagged photos, and has built an almost cult following on Twitter. I know that's just ONE example, but perhaps it's a good discussion to have in this forum. What are the advantages and limitations for businesses in building individual pages versus fan pages.

I am not actively using facebook, but I am one active user of twitter, Well this information is really very good. Thank you.

This stuff is SO hard to wrap my head around. Guess it's time to hire a pro. Or 2.