facebook

Sort yourselves out, Facebook!

I’ve set up and managed Facebook Pages for two companies now and there is one thing about them that really bugs me. You cannot switch ownership to another Facebook user. This is surely a glaring oversight from the Facebook team and I cannot believe they haven’t addressed it.

There are plenty of people with the same problem on Facebook’s forum pages and many, many requests have been sent via their suggestion facility.

Not only is it annoying but it is potentially damaging for companies. When the employee who set up the page in the first place moves on, your only recourse is to delete the page – or trust that he or she will do it. This could mean thousands of man hours wasted, all your content gone and you have to begin again.

Worst case scenario, your former employee and Facebook Page manager leaves under a cloud and exacts revenge through the page. They, after all, own it and you cannot switch it.

In my case, I deleted the page set up for the first company. There was no other option. I could have been far more malicious – as far as I was concerned I was treated badly when I left that company and it would have been a simple task to ruin the reputation of that particular online company. Instead, a lot of work just ended up going down the toilet and they had to begin again.

As it happens, I would have happily just handed ownership to whoever they wanted me to – but I couldn’t.

In the case of the second company there are two Facebook Pages to consider. But again, all I can do is delete them. There hasn’t been as much work put into these and the company in question is unlikely to want to take ownership anyway, so no harm done overall.

That doesn’t make it right though, does it? What makes it worse is Facebook offers the option of being a business user, which might seem like the solution – but only if you don’t already have a personal account! And who doesn’t have a Facebook account these days? Not many.

So come on Facebook – you’re leaving a lot of companies with no option other than NOT have a Facebook presence and that’s damaging to your business, surely?