Hey guys! I read here recently that a personal profile with 5,000 friends can opt to turn that profile into a page with 5,000 likes. I also read recently that a fan pages with similar names can be combined into one page.
Anybody have any experience with this? If so please mention your experience as well as the pros and cons of doing this, thank you!
Yes, you should be able to turn FB profile into page, but I’m not sure is it worth it. Profiles tend to have higher reach than pages, on the other side, profile get blocked or suspended easier.
Merging pages also isn’t easy task as it was before.
From my experience, they need to have almost identical names and same category.
Last time when I was merging pages I had to make these changes:
Change category of both pages to Local business
Change name of Page 2 to match Page 1 and this took couple of weeks since Page 2 was had completely different name. For example:
Page 1 was named Cats and Page 2 was named Dogs.
Since FB doesn’t let you to completely change your page name, I had to add “love Cats” to page 2, so its new name was “Dogs love Cats”, then in a week or so, I removed “Dogs” word, so the page name was “love Cats”.
Tried to merge, didn’t worked.
Then I had to rename Page 2 to “love Catz” since I wasn’t able to remove “love” from the name. FB didn’t let me. Probably because I already had page “Cats”.
Finally, after another week, I managed to remove “love” and had two pages with similar names: Cats and Catz.
Then they let me merge them.
I see, thank you for your input!
The page and profile would both be similar. What I’m thinking of doing is having both as separate entities and than merging them once I reach 10,000 likes. Thoughts on this strategy?
Well, you can try, it’s up to you. Worst case scenario: you’ll have 2 pages each with 10K fans 
I just like profiles more since they have higher reach, but again, as I said, there’s also higher risk of getting banned.