I‘m writing a series of blog posts right now on building your personal brand (shameless plug: you can sign up for the weekly update here).

One question I get asked a lot is, “should I just use my personal profile on Facebook to connect with people, or should I have a Page?”

If you have a business that is separate from you, you should probably have a page. This allows you to very neatly separate your personal self from your professional self on Facebook. However, if you are your own business, the lines start to blur a little.

A great third option is to enable subscriptions on your personal account. You simply post to your (personal) FB account as you normally would, but you get to control what the people who subscribe to you see or don’t see.

Subscriptions only go one way. People can sign up for your RSS feed, but you won’t see their stuff, like if you were friends. Any post you put up that is “Public” will be seen by anyone who subscribes to your feed. Anything you put up as being for “friends” they will not.

Check out this blog post for more information, and to learn how to do it. 

Next, you’ll want to create a box for your website or blog to allow people to follow you, similar to a Facebook  Like Box. It will look like this:

Here’s how: 

• In Facebook, click on the icon that looks like a gear in the far, right-hand upper corner. Select “account settings” out of the drop-down menu.
• On the left-hand side, in the main navigation, select the “Followers” option.
• Copy the code under “follow plugin.”
• Sign into your WordPress account, then in the dashboard, navigate to appearance–>widgets.
• Find the HTML/Text widget, and drag it into the sidebar, dropping it where you want it to be.
• Paste the code into the text widget, save, and check to see that’s its working.

NOTE: I am using this option on my Cooking by Laptop blog, because I don’t have a Facebook page for that blog. And this blog is my “personal” blog, so it just seems to work better. Whenever I publish a new blog post, I simply make sure it’s public, and then all my subscribers can see it.