As first reported but my friend Darcy over at The Business of Diving, Facebook has now provided dive shops who inadvertently started using a facebook personal profile as a business with a way or converting their pages over to a business page.

Facebook is doing more and more to add more functionality, specifically for small businesses, and all of that functionality is focused on the page. There are a lot of differences between profiles and pages, which makes pages absolutely the only way for your dive center to get a lot of value out of Facebook.

Now that facebook has provided this functionality to convert pages; to me it signals that they are going to start cracking down on this as using fB this way as it is a violation of their terms of service.

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I was just on the PADI Facebook page and noticed that lately they are sending out quite a few updates in different languages. While I understand why PADI as an internatiaonal organization is doing this, it's not having the desired effect.

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I'm sure everyone's aware that facebook has rolled out the new Business Pages look along with some really cool new features. One that I'm really impressed with is the ability to interact within facebook as your business.

New Facebook Feature - Use Facebook as "Your Business Name Here"

This in my opinion is going to big win for dive shops that are using business pages correctly on facebook. Here's why...

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Just this morning I was participating in a discussion over at the linked-in group Business of Diving Institute (BODI) where someone asked:

Did you design and build your website yourself? How much time did you spend and do you optimise and run it yourself or pay someone to do it...

I gave my honest opinion and tried to be objective as possible in my reply. In doing so I failed to see a little bit about the person who it turns out wasn't a dive center but another company in the web design business. Basically, he was trying to create the discussion so it would possibly generate a few leads. Nothing wrong with that...I just should have checked before replying. So shame on me for taking the bait! That said, here was my reply for any dive centers considering building their own website.

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Many times dive shop owners know they need a blog, they will sometimes even start one. But then comes the hard part...what to put on my scuba diving blog? This is where many get stuck, so after one or two entries, they get abandoned.

Here's a quick list of ideas to quickly reignite your scuba blog. Some new, some not so new.

Number 5 is my personal favorite.

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Just a quick update and a look ahead with things from Engage Your Divers.  Things here have been pretty busy and hectic to say the least.  Unfortunately like everyone else, the blog is usually the first thing to get put off...

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