Hi everyone,
I have a personal account and have grown it to 17k with follow/unfollow and organically. It seems like business accounts are actually doing better at this point and the analytics would be great, but I’m still worried ‘the other shoe would drop’ so to speak and my engagement would crash if I wasn’t constantly advertising. Opinions?
Every account is different. In my experience, switching to business did not impact engagement (only done this and monitored in the photography niche), and it keeps growing. It might for say an account in a different niche. At the end of the day, it’s up to what matters to you. Are you willing to take this bet for analytics and what “seems” do be doing better? Can you survive without the analytics or do you really have to take the chance? IF you can answer these’s you’re good to go.
Never heard of engagement tanking when converting a normal account to a business account. The analytics are definitely sweet and will help you grow. Even if you’re not hooking it up to some third party tool, just the basic numbers will help.
Ex: You can see how many people saw your post from various sources, including the Explore page. Always useful if you want to run tests with different hashtags or posting schedules and see how it affects your visibility.
Engagement used to be lowered when switching to business profile. I’m not sure it is still the case, as they have made so many changes recently. I guess it’s time to test it furthermore… 
I’d always heard from others that their engagement went down after switching to a business profile, but that wasn’t the case for me at all. I had an engagement boost immediately after switching to a business profile, and it hasn’t tapered off. It could have easily been a coincidence, of course. But either way - I felt it was worth it or the analytics access.
I had a large account that I switched to business account and engagement plummeted even though I was posting the same great content. It took a few months but I got it back to where it needed to be. Not sure if this is still happening but it is my experience