This is Peggy (not her real name, I don’t think). She likes Nikon cameras so much she created a Facebook fan page last year. Word of mouth spread and over 5,000 people are fans of the page.
You’re the marketing manager at Nikon. You want to create a fan page, recognize Peggy did all this work; and ask her if she’d be willing to transfer page ownership to you in exchange for a brand new camera.
Hah! You wish.
Regardless what you offer Peggy or she asks you, the page transfer can’t occur. She can add you as an administrator, but she retains administrative rights as the creator. She owns it, according to Facebook. Owners can’t be transferred under current Facebook law:
Now… imagine Peggy is a member of your staff, not a random stranger. She is the online marketing coordinator and manages page updates by herself.
She tenders her resignation, effective next week.
You better know that she manages the corporate page, because if the IT department deletes her email address and she’s off on an extended vacation around the world, good luck determining the password which is linked to her email address which is linked to that Facebook account.
Ken Mueller and Jeff Cobb, among others, share similar what-if scenarios and explain why Facebook policies for fan pages are corporate nightmares.
Oh yeah, one more thing: Disgruntled employees causing havoc in the company name aside, also keep in mind that the owner of a fan page is prohibited from writing to that page wall as a person, only as the page name. For instance, I’m the owner of a page name called City of Newburyport, Massachusetts. I wish I knew this when I created the page in September 2008, but I can’t post to the wall as “Ari Herzog” because I can’t remove myself as an administrator. I can add other admins, but my name will never be on that wall — under current Facebook law.
There are over 142,000 fans of Nikon on Facebook, by the way…
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I yet not have a Facebook fan page but the last paragraph give me a decent idea what should I do when I will create a Fan page. Thanks for this insightful article Ari.
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I wish Facebook would address issues like this rather than confuse users with change to the interface every couple of months.
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I had been trying to figure this out for a high school booster fan page we started a while back. I’m trying to decide if this is just an unexpected accident of programing or if they have a specific agenda to avoid the trading/selling of pages. Either way, it’s not only a nightmare for corporations. Many not-for-profits, school groups and community organizations depend on these pages now. Not being able to lock out or change an individual doesn’t provide real world usability.
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So does that mean I can’t sell my Farmville farm to my friends.
If not, there goes my retirement income..
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Thanks for mentioning my blog, Ari. This is just one of those ongoing problems that irritates me, especially as I work with clients to set up their pages.
Recent scenario. I pitched a Social Media plan to a small local grocery store chain. One of the principals was interested, but his partners decided against it due to the costs. A few months later, they now have a Facebook Page. It was started by a high school student who works as a check out person at one of their stores. This teenager now owns that page, it is set up incorrectly, and gets updated about once a month. Add to that the potential problems when this kid leaves/gets fired…..and yeah. A mess.
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Perhaps the answer — under current FB rules — is simpler than we think: For anyone needing a page, create a profile first. Make it in your own name but use a generic email address, e.g. webmaster@business.com or webmaster2@business.com etc. Then, use that pseudo-real person and email addy as the page owner. Of course, that doesn’t solve it if the non-company creates the page.
Right– but what if you already have your own profile? That’s normally the problem I’ve heard about. Many people already have a profile and want it to remain completely personal, but then are asked at their workplace to begin and maintain a corporate page. According to most of the tips I see here and elsewhere online, the company account needs to be generic and stay with the corporation to avoid future complication if they change jobs or whatever. So what are they supposed to do?
There are so many shortcomings with the Facebook Fan Page Admin experience. I actually created a fake profile to create a fan page to eliminate these issues. Which at its core is counterintuitive to the way this whole social media thing is supposed to work, right?
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Be more careful there, Andrea, for FB specifically frowns on fake names.
I think they will sort all these things out eventually, but I get the sense that Facebook is pretty much just a couple of pages ahead in the reading material for the course they are teaching.
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…not pages behind?
I hope shes a reseller. LOL
Very informative. I deleted my FB account sometime back, but this is very handy info if I ever go back.
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Why did you delete your account? How did your then-friends react?
They’re the reason I deleted it, lol. At the time I only signed on to shut a few people up. I checked it every few months only find find a whole mess of crap that I either wasn’t interested in or just didn’t get….
Sign up to this or that game, sending me flowers and all that crap. I didn’t know about the fan pages at that time which is what marketers really need to use.
If I want to chit-chat with real world friends, I call them.
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Thanks for the warning. We are just looking at setting up a page of Facebook and had not really given any thought as to what user account we should use. I guess the best bet is to set up a generic user account that stays with the company.
Thanks again
Be careful of setting up a generic user account. That’s also a violation of FB’s TOS. It has to be a real person. You can see why this is problematic across the board.
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Wow! This is a very interesting subject. I wonder why Facebook doesn’t allow the ownership rights to be transferred. This glitch could prevent many companies from creating Fan Pages. Thanks for an insightful article. I learned something I didn’t know before.
I do social media for my job and we’re a medium-sized tech brand. I noticed that some fans had created pages using our corporate name and this goes against Facebooks TOS since they’re not the official brand representatives.
It was pretty easy to solve this though. I simply contacted Facebook via their online form. Just go to “Report Page” on the left column and then click on the “Is this your intellectual property?” link and fill out the form. I got an immediate reply and overall it took only took about 5 days and our corporate page went from about 100 fans to over 4,500. I’m certain the people at Nikon could do the same thing.
Since our fans dedicated their time to creating the page and it did kind of felt like we were cheating to get ahead. I even asked Facebook to put me in touch with the original creator so we could give them a free gift as a token of our appreciation, but they never got back to me about this.
This reminds me of the Coca-Cola case study (where they allowed the original page creators to stay on as admins). I originally thought about doing the same thing but it was too difficult to sell the idea internally. Good for Coca-Cola that they figured out a way to keep the original page creators in the loop though.
Anyway, here’s our page if you’re a fan of computer hardware: http://www.facebook.com/GIGABYTE
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I wish I had read this post before I created a fan page for a show I’m hosting. I hope Facebook does something about this. It would be really nice to reply to comments and answers using my profile rather than the show’s name….Grrrrrr….
Anyhow, great post Ari! It certainly cleared some doubts of mine
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Ok. so if I create a generic account with my real name but my work email, am I violating any rules because I already have a personal account with my personal email? The only thing that would be the same is my name.
I do not want to get my personal account banned for something related to work, but wish to make it easy to transfer pages when I move on.
There’s also the business account, which lacks some of the core functionality of a regular individual account, but can be used to manage Pages and Ads:
See http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=721
But you’re not supposed to create a business account if you also have a real personal FB account.
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Actually, if you are using it for a business, you are supposed to use a business page, not your personal page. In most cases, your business page will be your business name, not your name. Unless of course you just do business under your own name, and even then you can still have both.
…as if Facebook would deactivate you for using one over the other.
Facebook should reformat their rules and policies regarding the ownership of the pages. Since they are not personal page, it would be great if you can transfer the ownership of the pages.
Page ownership can now be transferred.
Very funny! Yet also really silly at the same time…
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