Find the show notes and more resources at http://createifwriting.com/124  Join the fabulous Facebook community here: http://createifwriting.com/community  And get email updates every Friday: http://createifwriting.com/quickfix  "Forget Facebook pages. I'm just going to create a Facebook group." "I'm not using a Facebook business page. My personal profile gets way more interaction." "My Facebook page drives most of my traffic. I'm scared my income will dry up along with my pageviews." These are the kinds of things I've been hearing since Mark Zuckerberg made the announcement about the new Facebook update and what this would mean for seeing posts from a Facebook business page in the newsfeed. People are panicking. Many people are peddling specific advice about what you should do. Rumors are rampant. So how DO you handle the new Facebook update and make a Facebook business page work?  Let's dive in! Read the Facebook newsroom announcement HERE and Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook post HERE.  HOW FACEBOOK UPDATES MAY IMPACT YOUR FACEBOOK BUSINESS PAGE The big Facebook update in 2018 is all about engagement. According to Mark Zuckerberg, engagement is the holy grail and passive scrolling needs to stop. (I really hate people telling me what to do, first of all, so you can read more about my thoughts on this aspect HERE.) No one knows exactly what this means. We can take some clues from the announcements, but realize that we are all making inferences from a pretty vague statement. What we KNOW: Facebook will prioritizing friends and family over posts from pages and brands. If you aren't creating engaging content on your page, you will most affected. If you are creating engagement content, you shouldn't see as much of an effect. Paid promotions (ads) will still take place.     WHY YOU NEED TO MAKE A FACEBOOK PAGE IN 2018 More than any other question I've heard in the last few weeks (and even years, since Facebook pages stopped having great organic reach in 2013) is: Do I even NEED a Facebook page if no one will see my posts? People still expect you to have a public presence on Facebook and will look for you there. Whether you are an author or a blogger or a more traditional brand, the Facebook business page is similar to a blog in that it is the public face for you. (To be clear, a Facebook profile is what you create first on Facebook, where you can friend people. A business page is an optional add-on where people can like your page.) Even if you just create a page as a sort of bookmark with basic info, photos, and a pinned post sharing that you primarily hang out on Instagram, you should have a page. How much it figures into your strategy is up to you! (To create a strategy for your social media, check out my free planner!)  Facebook prefers that you have a business page for business reasons. In the Facebook Terms of Service, your personal profile is not to be used primarily for commercial reasons. Your Facebook page is precisely for commercial reasons. The key word is "primarily." Facebook can decide what is too much selling and promotion. This means you should be careful! Facebook could, at any time, kick you off from violating this. Then you cannot have a page (you have to have a profile to have a page). You cannot create a new profile under their Terms of Service. You're done. Use your profile for business with great caution. That said, the line between business and personal is much fainter than it ever was before. There are so many more bloggers who blog about their personal lives and entrepreneurs living a different lifestyle where business and personal are not so clearly separated. People in your personal life may want to read your blog and know what you are up to professionally. You can also follow people's personal profile. This means that you can choose to see someone in your newsfeed that you aren't friends with when they post public things to their timeline. I know some large people (Mark Zuckerberg included) who hav