Have you been locked out of a Facebook fan page that you administer? Are you no longer able to post to the Wall of some of your favourite fan pages? Fan pages with millions of fans have been locked and/or deleted, and perhaps yours could be next if your page is no longer in compliance with FB’s new terms and conditions.
FB have decided that Fan Pages from now on shall only be Brand Pages, so no “unofficial” pages will be allowed, including pages that aren’t about an actual person or organisation (no more “I heart Mom” pages). They’ve opened up the option of “Community Pages” for fans to create communities with looser rules, but typically for FB, they didn’t give people the option of migrating their unofficial Fan Page to a Community Page – they just locked admins out of their own pages, sometimes handing them over to the “official” brand-owner, and sometimes deleting them.
Fan/brand pages for blogs do not seem to be affected: FB seems to view us as legit. But if you have a fan page that’s just for something fun, you might like to start building a new Community Page and letting all your fans know to become fans there instead before it gets deleted.
Oh thanks for that, facebook seriously is one pain in the ass that they don’t bother to communicate their changes to their users and if they do it’s barely comprehensible.
It’s also an accessibility issue (stating the obvious here) that people who aren’t so internet savvy can not easily figure out their privacy settings.
.-= Kowalski´s last blog ..Freedom of Speech =-.
Facebook stinks.
I can see why they’ve done it in one way – it’s going to make life a lot harder for cybersadists to put up grotesque fan pages that mock someone else’s pain e.g. the Constance Stop Yer Cryin’ page. They could also well give “Official” Pages more tools for controlling the content posted on their Walls, because they want those pages to monetise themselves as long as it’s on FB’s terms and they get a cut.
It’s just that, as usual, they just switch without notice and users have to like it or lump it. The blogger I linked to in the post, Laurel Papworth, emphasised that this is why, if one is using FB and Twitter etc as part of a branding strategy, they should just be spokes on your hub rather than your primary web platform.