Have you heard about Facebook professional mode? Are you wondering whether you should convert your personal profile to professional mode?

This new feature aims to help content creators establish a public identity without creating a separate business account. By enabling professional mode, you can benefit from a set of professional tools, safety features, and monetization products while keeping your personal connections with friends and family.

In this article, we discuss the perks of professional mode while explaining how it differs from personal profiles and business pages. Read all the way to the end to find out how professional mode can help you grow your online audience when you’re participating in your favorite Facebook groups.

What is Facebook Professional Mode?

Professional mode is designed to help you build a public presence as a creator on Facebook without creating a separate account for business purposes. 

By enabling Professional mode, you can establish a public identity as a content creator while keeping your personal connections with friends and family on your profile. Think of it like a marriage between your personal profile and a business page.

You can continue connecting with friends and family through your profile, while also benefiting from a set of professional tools, safety features, and monetization products. The best part is you aren’t creating a new profile to manage. Activating this feature simply adds professional tools to your existing profile AND gives you greater visibility throughout Facebook.

What is the Difference Between Professional Mode and a Personal Profile?

A personal profile is your homebase 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.

As a profile, you can have friends and followers. Usually you’ll have 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.

What About My Privacy Settings?

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.

Additionally professional mode gives you access to Moderation Assist, which increases the security of your profile. You can use Moderation Assist to automatically hide or reject certain comments based on criteria you choose.

What is the Difference Between Professional Mode and a Business Page?

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 do I Turn On/Off Facebook Professional Mode?

Turning on professional mode is as simple as the flip of a switch:

• Go to your Facebook profile and find the three dots (…) on the right side below your cover image.
• Click or tap on the three dots
• Select Turn ON or OFF professional mode

It’ll take a few minutes for the profile to switch, and then you’ll be all set. You can turn professional mode on or off at any time. When you turn it off, though, you will lose access to analytical data on your posts, Moderation Assist and monetization options.

How Can Professional Mode Help Me in Groups?

Among the benefits of professional mode, Facebook lists “discovery opportunities.” Most social media experts have understood this to mean that professional mode profiles get priority ranking in the feed and greater visibility throughout the platform.

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. So even without a business page, you can establish your expertise and authority in groups by adding value. 

Should I Use Facebook Professional Mode?

Turning on professional mode isn’t for everyone. Though it’s easy to turn it off and on, you probably want to think through your decision. 

The first and most important question to ask yourself is which of professional mode’s benefits appeal to you most. The second is to determine how likely you are to access those benefits.

Based on the features 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. 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.

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.