On Thursday I was speaking to a group of 100+ about Social Media and ‘The Facebook Factor’. As I ran through some of the areas to pay attention to when setting up a Business Facebook Page I noted “be careful who owns your Facebook Page as once it’s set up it can’t be changed … at least not at this time.”
I was wrong!! One of the event delegates came up and questioned the accuracy of my statement and it turns out she was 100% correct (thank you Brenda Garcia!!).
While the information was difficult to pinpoint clearly on Facebook’s website, some digging on the internet led to the discovery that Facebook had changed this policy. The information was further confirmed when I set up a Facebook Page on my husband’s account, setting myself up as an Administrator and then deleted the Facebook Page from his account. The Page now showed that I was the owner of the account and it was listed on my personal profile with me as the ‘Page Owner’. I was then also able to delete the Facebook Page from my personal profile, confirming that the account ownership had effectively been transferred from my husband to me, simply through the process of making me an administrator … and then deleting the account from his profile.
So here are my new ‘words of wisdom’ when setting up your new Business Facebook Page. Make sure you have at least two people identified as ‘Administrators’ on your Facebook Page and ensure the people who are administrators are people you trust. And here’s why:
- If only one person is an administrator and something happens to them, and you don’t know how to get into their personal profile and thus your Page, you could be in trouble. Only administrators can access the Page information to make changes, etc.
- Administrators have equal rights on your Page – Page ownership is not the issue and any administrator can delete any other administrator thus revoking their privileges and potentially creating some issues for you. (Not likely to happen if you’ve chosen ones you have high trust in.)
In reality, Facebook (at this time) provides a 14 day window where a deleted Page can be restored by any of the administrators even when a delete Page request has been made. And, as long as you catch this you are fine. But also an important reason for ensuring more than one person is set up as an administrator, and people you trust.
The plus of all of this is you no longer need to worry about whose profile your Facebook Page is hosted on as any administrator can add new administrators and delete other administrators, etc. So, if you sell your business or someone resigns it’s (almost) as simple as adding a new person as an administrator. The big issue, as with most things in business, is the trust factor.
One other note, in my ‘research’ I discovered that a business can now add a Facebook Page without having a personal profile. There are a few drawbacks but these are not insurmountable if you add administrators that DO have personal Facebook profiles.