Facebook’s Pages Formerly Known As Fan Pages – UPDATED

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We don’t quite know what to call Facebook’s new, previously called, Fan Pages.

“Like” Pages?

It’s kind of like when Prince changed his name to that symbol… nobody knew quite what to call him so they just called him ‘the artist formerly known as Prince’. For now we will just refer to the old Facebook Fan Pages simply as ‘pages’. That is until they change them again.

Sorry, you’re on your own with what to call “the artist formerly known as Prince”.

Having created several pages for clients before the switch, I was used to things working a bit differently: You could create the page (which makes you top Admin), add the company principals as Admins, and then remove yourself as admin when the project ended. At that point, the next person under you (the second one you had added as Admin) became the chief Admin.

But not any longer.

This is critical, folks. You create a page now, and you’re head Admin on it. Forever. The only way to drop off as Admin now is to delete the whole page. Ack!

Let’s say you have an employee or web developer do this for you. You love the page, all goes well. A year from now you’ve got a bunch of followers/fans/people who ‘liked’ your page, but the creator (the employee or web developer), the head Admin, of the page decides they’ve had enough of Facebook and cancels their account. Or you fire that employee.

Guess what? Your page just disappeared for good.

While I don’t yet see a graceful way around this, at least until Facebook fixes this glaring omission, my suggestion is as follows: Have the owner of the company, create the page under their name (the web developer or social media person can do it under the principals account, then add themselves as second Admin). If you’re a large corporation like Cisco, I don’t have a suggestion. Maybe create it under the page of the VP of Social Media Marketing, or the legal team.

We’d love to hear your experience with this, and any workarounds you’ve discovered. Please feel free to leave them in the comments.

UPDATED: For the moment FB seems to have come up with a fix: It seems all Admins are now of equal status. (No longer is the first Admin and creator of the page the only one who can delete the others.) It seems now (at least until FB makes yet another change) that all Admins have equal ability to remove each other. While this “fix” has the potential of creating issues all it’s own, it is a step in the right direction.