…and some actions you need to take.
Forget getting your knickers in a twist about Facebook making ‘fans’ to ‘likes’ because there are other changes which have taken place or are about to be rolled out which require actions.
Whether you manage your own business Facebook page or provide the service of setting up and maintaining a business page for clients at least one of these changes will affect you.
Transfer of Ownership
Something that has bugged me from the start is the inability to create a page for your client and then transfer the ownership once it is built. This meant, in order to set up a business page on behalf of your client the options were:
- Gain access to the business owners existing facebook account (which naturally in most cases wasn’t an option).
- Create the page under your own profile and be bound to that page even if the client moves on (if the creator removed themselves, the page was deleted).
- Create a seperate personal profile for the business and set up the business page from that (but setting up multiple profiles is against Facebooks T&C’s and potentially leads to the termination of ALL your Facebook accounts).
Thankfully it’s now changed.
I’m not sure when this change happened as I can’t find the specific announcement but it seems the page creator is no longer bound to the page and can remove themselves from admin leaving the page intact.
What to do next?
- If you created a page under your own account, you don’t need to do anything unless the client has moved on. In which case you can free yourself from that page without the fear of it being deleted. As long as an admin remains!
- If you were forced to set up a seperate profile in order to create the page now delete that account. Not before making yourself or another user an admin of course!
Also see How to Permanently Delete your Facebook Account
Custom Page Dimensions
Another change that is being rolled out this month is the dimensions of page tabs from 760 pixels to a narrower 520 pixels. This means a bit of work will be needed for any business page using customised tabs and boxes. Particularly FBML pages styled to be wider than 520 pixels and any images that were designed to span the full width.
Also see Facebook Fan Page Changes.
Notes Formatting and Tagging
I mainly use the notes application on business pages to import an external feed. Recently I’ve had a few problems wich I can only imagine it was a bug left over from recent Notes changes. Notes now has easy to use formatting tools which includes the ability to tag users and pages within the text of the note itself.
I need to have a play around with the new notes but I can already imagine ways I can make use of the tagging within the text option so perhaps I will use notes for more than importing feeds now.
The issues I had with the import function were:
- Not able to stop importing an existing feed to Business Page notes
- When trying to importing a feed to business page notes, Facebook instead imported them to my personal profile notes.
These appear to been ironed out over the weekend and I’ve been able to do what I wanted.
Also see Facebook Upgrades Notes.
