Facebook Business Pages Are Broken

Facebook Business Pages Are Broken

The current Facebook Business Pages system is flawed in many ways. The system seemingly encourages orphaned pages and these orphaned pages pollute the system and can even overshadow your legitimate business page. What makes these flaws worse is that Facebook makes it extremely difficult to correct the resulting issues that very commonly arise.

Examples of Facebook Business Page problems:

  • the system encourage countless useless, orphaned pages
  • autocomplete for your business name shows dead pages instead of your business
  • FB Business Support refuses to admit there is an issue
  • FB Business Support refuses to pass along user’s concerns

Here’s a common scenario that illustrates one such example.

You run a successful local business and are seeing some great results from your hard work. You decide that the next step is to open up a second location. Exciting! Being the conscientious person you are, you realize the importance of online marketing and decide to add your new location, which is opening soon, to your FB Business Page. Great idea, right?

Wrong.

You create additional Locations underneath your main FB business page using the Locations feature. However, once you do this you can’t mark a Location as ‘opening soon’. One for the first problems with this is that, when people start typing in your business name looking for your existing location, your new, not yet open location, now shows up in autocomplete instead! This is confusing your clients and potential clients and draws attention away from your existing business. The logical next step to fix this problem should be to remove the new Location you just created until it is actually open. Unfortunately, doing this has significant negative effects.

When you create a new Location for your Business, Facebook automatically creates a ‘child location page’ for each of your locations, including this new one that you just created. When you delete your new Location from you Facebook Business Locations, your child page associated with it lives on but you no longer have the ability to manage it. This leads to a few problems.

Firstly, your new child location page is an orphan. You can’t manage it and FB will not remove it. You can’t reclaim it either. The only option FB offers is that you provide them with the following:

  • A copy of a valid government-issued photo ID, such as a current driver’s license or a passport, of the individual signing the statement.
  • A notarized and signed statement from a person with sufficient knowledge and authority over this matter that includes all of the following: A description of your relationship to the Page (and authority to request a change in the person(s) who manage the Page, as applicable);
  • The name of the current person(s) who manage the Page, as applicable; The relationship of the above person(s) to the Page; An explanation of your request, and whether there has been a termination of the employment and/or business relationship with the named person(s), as applicable; All documentation supporting your request [SPECIFY HERE IF APPLICABLE BASED ON REQUEST: including death certificate OR including a declaration from legal counsel on transfer of Page ownership rights];
  • The Facebook account or email address associated with the Facebook account (or Timeline) that you wish to have added as the new admin of the Page; and A declaration under penalty of perjury that the information you have provided is true and accurate (your statement must include this language). Once you have provided this information, we may follow up with additional requests for information or documentation to evaluate your request.

Wow. Was there a line in there about giving them your first born? There may as well be.

They want a copy of your personal ID in the form of a copy of your drivers license or passport? Given their horrible history of privacy issues, Facebook is one of the last companies you want to give this to! That’s a non starter right there.

However, in addition to that, they want you to go down to the bank and get someone to sign a statement.

Claiming your business in the first place was as simple as accepting an automated phone call at your business number. However, for some reason, reclaiming an orphaned page (that they know very well was created by you) requires enough hoop jumping to kill a horse.

You cannot claim your old, new location page. You cannot merge your old, new location. You cannot claim the old, new vanity name that shows up in the URL. And of course, as everyone knows, Facebook support is the worst. Even if you speak with a real person, this cannot be fixed.

Simply. Broken.

Have you had a painful experience with Facebook Business Pages and Locations? Tell us about it in the comments.

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