Can I hide my Facebook business page from friends?

As a business owner, you may want to keep your Facebook business page separate from your personal profile and friend connections. The good news is that Facebook offers options to control the visibility of your business page to different audiences.

Why Would You Want to Hide Your Business Page from Friends?

There are a few common reasons why someone would want to hide their Facebook business page from friends:

Privacy – You may not want everyone on your friends list to see all your business posts and activity.

Segmentation – Keeping separate personal and professional presences allows you to segment your audiences.
Clutter – You don’t want business updates cluttering your friends’ news feeds.
Professionalism – Maintaining different personal and business profiles projects a more professional image.

Can I Completely Hide My Business Page from Friends?

Unfortunately, there is no way to fully hide a Facebook business page from your friends on the platform. Even if you remove yourself as an admin on the page, mutual friends will still be able to see and access the page through your profile connection.

How to Minimize Visibility of Your Business Page to Friends

While you can’t completely hide your business page from friends, you can take steps to minimize its visibility:

Remove Yourself as an Admin

The first step is to remove yourself as an admin from your business page. Here’s how:

Go to your business page and click “Settings” at the bottom of the left menu.
Under the “Page Roles” tab, click on your own name to open the admin settings.
Select “Remove” to take yourself off as an admin.

This will disconnect the page from your personal profile so your friends won’t see your business posts and engagement anymore.

Ask Friends to Unlike the Page

Short of deleting connections, you can’t control who likes your business page. But you can ask trusted friends to unlike your page so your updates don’t show in their feeds.

Avoid Promoting to Friends

Be strategic with page promotions to avoid targeting friends. For example, when boosting posts, focus on geographic and interest-based targeting over connections targeting.

Create a Separate Business Profile

Maintaining completely separate personal and business profiles on Facebook is the best way to isolate business activity from your friends. Just don’t use a personal photo or make connections between the accounts.

Pros of Disconnecting Your Business Page from Personal Profile

Here are some of the advantages of disconnecting your Facebook business page from your personal account:

More privacy and separation of personal and professional lives

Avoid confusing friends and family with business updates
Present a more polished, professional brand image
Enable more strategic audience targeting

Reduce clutter for friends and followers
Focus efforts on growing an audience that cares about your business

Cons of Disconnecting Your Business Page from Personal Profile

There are also a few potential drawbacks to be aware of:

Loss of convenience of managing everything from one place
Less able to leverage existing personal connections for business goals
May be more difficult to build an initial audience and get engagement

Some loss of personal touch and connection with brand

Other Ways to Segment Facebook Audiences

In addition to disconnecting your business page, there are a few other ways to segment audiences on Facebook:

Use Facebook Groups

Facebook groups allow you to have focused discussions with a specific subset of people. You can have one group for personal connections and one for business.

Create Lists

Facebook lists let you group connections together for more targeted updates. You could create a “close friends” and “acquaintances” list.

Adjust Privacy Settings

Adjust your main profile’s privacy settings to limit visibility of certain posts to only certain connections.

Use Other Channels

You may want to connect with personal friends predominantly on Facebook while directing business contacts to LinkedIn, Twitter, or email.

Should You Completely Disconnect Your Business and Personal Profiles?

Whether you completely disconnect your business and personal presences depends on your goals, priorities and audience. Here are a few key considerations:

Considerations for Disconnecting	Considerations for Linking
Want strict privacy and segmentation Business caters to a very different audience than personal connections Have other channels to reach friends if desired Don’t need help with initial business page growth	Relying on friends for initial business page likes and engagement Want convenience of managing both presences together Business relates to your areas of personal interest and connections Ok with less segmentation and mixed business/personal

Other Facebook Business Page Privacy Tips

In addition to your admin connection settings, here are some other Facebook business profile privacy tips:

Use page moderation filters to block friends from seeing certain posts

Ask connections to adjust their notifications settings for your page
Avoid linking to personal accounts from your business profile and vice versa
Turn off comments on posts you want to limit visibility on

Create a branded/professional email just for your Facebook business use

Conclusion

While you can’t completely prevent friends from seeing your Facebook business page, you can take steps to minimize its visibility in their feeds and profiles. Removing yourself as a page admin, asking friends to unlike the page, and maintaining completely separate business and personal presences are the best ways to isolate your business activity.

With some strategic steps, you can keep Facebook friends and business audiences separate while still taking advantage of the platform for connecting with each group.