The Facebook Page Problem
Facebook Pages are a great tool for branding, promoting, interacting, and other various aspects of social media there is no question about that. However, with all that good, there are some real problems with Facebook Pages that I would like to see fixed. The two major problems I have seen to date are the inability to transfer the page’s creator status and how easy it seems to be to lose control over your page without any significant evidence of wrong doing. Both of these problems are pretty serious for companies using social media.
The inability to transfer a page’s creator status is a flaw (I think) in Facebook’s system. Often time the person who creates the page for the company is just an employee who has been authorized to manage it. What if that employee gets a job somewhere else or you fire them? Then what? I’m not saying the employee will sabotage your page (chances are they won’t, but it is possible), but it just does not look right to have a page’s creator be someone who doesn’t even work for the company. It could cause confusion and you may not want to associate your company with that person anymore. For this problem I would recommend creating the page under a generalized account for your company and assigning a couple of admins.
When it comes to losing control over your Facebook Page the possibility is definitely there. Why? Because all that really needs to happen is for Facebook to receive a complaint (I can totally see competitors in an industry doing this) and they will “look into it” and take action. Apparently they do not do much due diligence in checking whether the correct person actually owns the particular page. To make it even worse, they do not provide any way to contact them directly about it (more on that in a later post), essentially just leaving your page without anyone to manage it. That totally defeats the purpose of these Facebook Pages, doesn’t it? This is a serious problem and I know a company who this happened to recently (it still isn’t resolved either).
I really hope Facebook fixes these things before it gets out of control. Also, just to show you how quick they act without doing any checking, read this post on TechCrunch.