If you’re like me, then you like to keep a very high wall between who you are and what you do.

Because of this I have a very strict rule about becoming Facebook “friends” with business associates and potential clients.

This allows me to keep a big part of my life private. It also allows me to be myself without having to wonder about potential “career limiting” comments by friends or even by me. In short walling off this little part of my digital world frees me from professional persona.

And who really cares about pictures of my kids anyway?

But there is a significant proportion of Facebookers who have no problem mixing business and personal. That’s why so many speakers and consultants have 500 or more “friends.”

But what every business needs is to move those contacts to a custom fan page.

And the reasons are simple.

1- if you tie your blog to your personal account, not every “friend” will see it.
2- you can add custom applications to engage your “fans” in ways that you can’t do with a personal page.

So the first step is to build a Facebook Fan Page. But it’s not enough to just create a default page. You need to brand it.

I’ve recently created a Fan Page for Short Circuit Media.

Click here to visit it (and don’t forget to Like it).

The first thing you’ll see is a custom landing page with an introductory video. The big call to action is to “Like” the page.

This is important. Remember above when I said that not every friend will see your blog postings? Well if someone is a “Fan” your blog postings WILL show up in their feed.

You’ll also see on my page that I am giving away a free site evaluation when somebody “Likes” the page. An incentive is always good.

So now that your page is all set up, where do you go trolling for followers?

Well there are three places; Email Contacts, Facebook and Linkedin.

Linkedin allows you to export contacts. Here are the steps:

Go to Contacts>>Connections
Scroll to the bottom right corner of the screen and export.

Simple enough.

Now to move them to your new fan page.

In the Get Started page go through the steps.

– Click on Tell Your Fans
– Select Other tools
– Import the CSV file you just created in Linkedin.

Now don’t get too crushed if not everyone becomes a fan. Most won’t. But you may get a bunch. And that’s enough to get you started.