You can continue connecting with friends and family through your profile, and choose privacy settings for who gets to see what. The major benefit is not having to create a new profile to manage. Activating this feature simply adds professional tools to your existing profile AND gives you greater visibility throughout Facebook. Think of it like a marriage between your personal profile and a business page.
This guide explains how professional mode can help you grow your online audience when you’re participating in your favorite Facebook groups. And of course, how to turn it off.
Professional Mode Enables Certain Business Features on Personal Profiles
Turning on Professional Mode basically enhances your regular personal profile with more business benefits. As a digital creator, your profile shows a combined reach of friends + followers, and you get unlimited followers. Tracking and reporting helps you analyze your post performance, and if eligible, you could turn on monetization.
A personal profile is your home base on Facebook, the primary place from which all activity originates. You use your profile to connect with friends and family, to create business pages, to create events and to start and join groups.
If you have a business page, you can create events and groups as well, but personal profiles seem to get more reach than pages. And when it comes to groups and events, profiles have more freedom in how they interact with members and attendees. Plus, some people just don’t want to set up a separate Business page.
As a profile, you can have friends and followers — usually more friends than followers. By default, your friends see all of your posts and you see all of theirs. Followers, on the other hand, will see your public posts. You won’t see their posts unless you follow them back.
Facebook limits personal profiles to a maximum of 5,000 friends, which prevents you from growing a large audience through your profile. The only data you see on your profile posts are the number of reactions, comments and shares. Without performance metrics, you can’t make data-informed decisions on which content your audience prefers.
When you turn on professional mode, Facebook categorizes you as a digital creator.
- Though you are still limited to 5,000 friends, professional mode allows you an unlimited number of public followers.
- Instead of showing the number of friends and followers separately, professional mode combines the two. This makes for more impressive figures when others are investigating the scope of your online presence.
- Professional mode also gives you the opportunity to track, measure and analyze the performance of your profile content. As a creator, this means you can compare metrics on your Reels, Stories, live videos and other content types.
- If eligible, you can even earn money on the content you create.
Monetization Eligibility is For Video Creators
Monetization eligibility is based on a combination of followers, minutes of video views and minutes of live video. If you’re not interested in creating video content, you won’t be able to monetize using professional mode. Meta recommends you experiment with different formats, but mostly vertical Reels with original content that engages with your unique audience.
Privacy Settings Remain The Same
Professional mode still allows you to manage the privacy of your content on a post-per-post basis. Each time you post, you decide whether to make the content public viewable or restricted to friends only. Meta says:
“Once you turn on professional mode for your profile, anyone can follow you and see your public content in their feed, but you’ll still be in control of who sees what content you share. That means you can share public updates, or decide to share content with just your friends, too.”
Moderation Assist increases the security of your profile by automatically hiding or rejecting certain comments based on criteria you choose:
Professional Mode vs Facebook Business Pages
While professional mode opens up a bundle of professional tools to personal profiles, it’s not the same as creating a business page.
A business page is an individual property on Facebook, completely separate from your profile. Turning on professional mode doesn’t create anything new on Facebook. It only adds additional features to your existing profile.
Though professional mode allows creators access to performance data that used to be only available to pages, the similarities between the two end there.
- Business pages are able to create advertising accounts and run ads.
- A business page can represent celebrities, public figures, businesses, nonprofits, schools, organizations and more.
- As business entities, they can be managed by teams or a single individual.
- Anyone with administrative access to the page can post and respond to messages as the page.
- Pages also can plan and schedule content through Meta Business Suite, in addition to other third-party scheduling tools (e.g. Metricool or Hootsuite).
Even with professional mode turned on, the expectation is that your profile actually represents you — a living, breathing human.
- You can’t give others administrative access to your digital creator profile.
- You won’t have access to Meta Business Suite, and you can’t run ads as a digital creator.
- Third-party scheduling tools are not compatible with professional mode.
How to Turn Facebook Professional Mode On and Off
Turning on professional mode is the exact same as turning it off:
- Go to your Facebook profile and find the three dots (…) on the right side of the page, below your cover image.
- Click or tap on the three dots.
- Select Turn ON or OFF professional mode.
- Save if prompted.
It’ll take a few minutes for the profile to switch. You can turn professional mode on or off at any time. When you turn it off, though, you will lose access to past analytical data on your posts, Moderation Assist, monetization options, and the rest of the professional mode features.
Professional Mode Could Help Get More Followers From Group Activity
Among the benefits of professional mode, Facebook lists “discovery opportunities.” Most social media experts have understood this to
mean that professional mode profiles gets priority ranking in the feed and greater visibility throughout the platform, hopefully getting more engagement on your posts in your Facebook group.
When you post in groups, however, Facebook adds a “Follow” link next to your name. This makes it easy for other group members to investigate your profile and follow you without ever leaving the group.
The Follow link only appears to members who aren’t already connected to you on Facebook. This works even in groups that don’t allow pages as members.
Professional mode might help you decide between a business page or a FB group: Without a business page, you can establish your expertise and authority in groups by adding value as an individual contributor, and with professional mode on, it could earn you followers.
Plus there are still ways to monetize a Facebook group without turning on professional mode.
Should I Use Facebook Professional Mode?
Though it’s easy to turn it off and on, you probably want to think through your decision. Ask yourself two questions:
- Which of the professional mode features appeal to you most and why?
- How likely are you to access those benefits or rely on them for key parts of your business or decision-making?
Based on the tools and discoverability given to professional mode profiles, it appears Facebook is trying to entice creators to record and upload more Reels and live video to the platform (scared of Facebook lives? I’ve got a podcast for you).
If you don’t want to create video content and you don’t care about monetization, you might still want to try out professional mode. You won’t know how the enhanced safety features, professional tools and increased discoverability affect your profile until you try it out.
Hi
Question.
Can professional mode be accessed by a Facebook account of an under 18 year old in Australia
That’s a great question, John! This would fall under Facebook’s policy on teen accounts for creators. Here in the U.S. you can do it starting at age 16, so long as you have a public account and parent approval. Not sure how it’ll work in Australia since your country is more protective than the U.S. when it comes to social media regulations. Here’s a help article that might give you additional insight: https://www.facebook.com/help/1225481792077743/
The Follow link only appears to members who aren’t already connected to you on Facebook. This works even in groups that don’t allow pages as members.
Professional mode might help you decide between a business page or a FB group: Without a business page, you can establish your expertise and authority in groups by adding value as an individual contributor, and with professional mode on, it could earn you followers.
Plus there are still ways to monetize a Facebook group without turning on professional mode.
Should I Use Facebook Professional Mode?
Though it’s easy to turn it off and on, you probably want to think through your decision. Ask yourself two questions:
Which of the professional mode features appeal to you most and why?
How likely are you to access those benefits or rely on them for key parts of your business or decision-making?
Based on the tools and discoverability given to professional mode profiles, it appears Facebook is trying to entice creators to record and upload more Reels and live video to the platform (scared of Facebook lives? I’ve got a podcast for you).
If you don’t want to create video content and you don’t care about monetization, you might still want to try out professional mode. You won’t know how the enhanced safety features, professional tools and increased discoverability affect your profile until you try it out.
These are great points regarding professional mode, though I don’t recall ever saying professional mode is required to monetize Facebook groups. So many monetization options exist, which I’ve written about extensively.
I don’t have a professional status to turn on.
Access depends on various factors, including where you live, age of profile, etc. This is the most recent help article on the topic: https://www.facebook.com/help/2978174759158711 – Good luck!