Facebook Business Page Follies + Frustrations

You know, I love Facebook just as much as the next person. If you are on Facebook for personal reasons, as in to communicate or stay in touch regularly with friends and family, Facebook is *great*! It’s easy to update friends, upload pictures and videos.

However, if you are on Facebook for business reasons, then I’m afraid you’ll experience many challenging adventures that will be far from smooth sailing. Yes, it’s easy to set up a Facebook page for business. Yes, it’s just as easy to populate that page with content as you would a personal profile.

The problem lies in, for starters, making changes to your Facebook page. Say you want to change your Facebook page’s name. Let’s also say you originally named your biz page “X” but after a period of time, you realize your page really should be named “Y.” While your decision to rename your Facebook page may be very natural evolution of your business or marketing needs and goals, changing a page name on Facebook is not as natural, sad to say. In fact, it’s anti-natural. According to Facebook’s own FAQs, the only way to change a page’s name is to delete the page entirely and create a new one from scratch.

???

Geez, even Twitter makes it super simple to change your Twitter handle. I’m wondering why it has to be such a big friggin’ deal for Facebook when a business or even an individual has a need to change their page’s name. People change their names or usernames all the time for many reasons: the mood their in; perhaps they married or divorced; or perhaps they got inspired to make a change, update or upgrade to their online presence. The same milestones or events apply to a business. A business grows and evolves over time. Their product or service lines may change. Their own name may change due to re-branding or mergers and acquisitions or even the sale of a business. Change is the only constant we have face day in and day out and it’s surprising to me that Facebook is so resistant and anti-flexible to the changing needs of their personal and business users.

So what happens to Facebook page likers when you delete a page?

Well, if you delete page “X,” then absolutely plan to say good bye to all those likers. At this time, there is no way to export your list of likers. And there’s also no way to seamless transition those likers from page “X” to page “Y.” Yes, you can send an update or a message to all the likers to inform them of the change(s) etc. but seriously, there is no guarantee that those likers will (a) read your update and (b) choose to like your new, renamed page.

And what about all that ** content **!!!

Back to page “X” example … suppose you have to delete it to create a new page “Y” because it’s the only way Facebook will allow the name change … well, just like you will be saying au revoir to your likers, get ready to also say auf weidersehen to your content. Yep, this means all those photo albums, videos, links and notes and essentially anything you ever published on page “X” will basically all go to the crapper.

This is just devastating. Who wants to re-upload countless of photos and videos over again when really, they shouldn’t have to.

And custom FBML you may have had developed to improve the branding of your business page?

This includes custom tabs, custom graphics and layouts and the like. Well, my dear, just kiss these good bye too. This is very painful to accept because most folks don’t know how to customize their Facebook pages and, as a result, they pay agencies or vendors (like us) to improve the brand experience on their Facebook page. But if you bump into the changing-Facebook-page-name cross roads, all that customization will, too, be lost.

What I don’t get is … Facebook started those weekly page update emails to inform folks and businesses about the traffic and activity on their pages. They also recently improved their page analytics so that page owners would have more access to metrics. These moves clearly cater mostly to businesses who seek metrics for measurement against marketing and communications goals more so than individuals. Yet despite these “improvements,” Facebook fails miserably in the basics of page administration capabilities.

I find this all terribly frustrating because the potential for outreach and engagement on Facebook for businesses is just tremendous but these kinds page administration details can present serious yet unnecessary challenges when a business faces the need for page name change.

Thoughts are welcome…