As a company or brand, have you claimed your Facebook Community Page yet? Did you even know you could?
One of the supreme annoyances with Facebook for companies/brands has been that back in April Facebook rolled out the ability for users to create “community pages”… essentially “unofficial” pages for companies or brands – or any other topic.
But what was most annoying was this:
In many places on the site, Facebook linked to these community pages instead of the pages that companies had already invested time and money in developing.
For example, on the Info tab of my Facebook profile, the word “Voxeo” is a link to a page:
Here’s my problem as the person most involved with Voxeo’s social media marketing. That “Voxeo” link does NOT go to our “official” page at:
But instead goes to the community page at:
which only has information pulled from Wikipedia. That page does not have our most current info… has no contact info whatsoever… and all around is just a pretty useless page!
It’s been a rather frustrating and aggravating situation for many folks out there… particularly those who spent a significant amount to build out very detailed Facebook Pages… only to have Facebook point their name in many occurrences within the site over to this new “community page”.
How To Claim Your Community Page
Today, however, it seems that we may have an option. B.L. Ochman published an article in Ad Age today titled “Facebook Community Pages Are a Confusing Mess. Time To Fix Them” that points to the recent addition of a “Is this your page?” link at the bottom of each page:
BL Ochman also references an AllFacebook post about this issue from back on November 8th, so this link has been around for the past month or so. (Did you notice it? I certainly didn’t… and I’m on our Facebook page pretty much every day… but I’m not necessarily scrolling all the way down to the bottom!)
Going through the process is fairly straightforward. First you must assert that you are indeed the “official representative” for the page:
Next you have to somewhat bizarrely click through another screen that tells you that they now need to verify what you just asserted:
[NOTE TO FACEBOOK: Sooo… why couldn’t you have just put this text on the top of the NEXT page and killed this dialog box?]
Clicking through this useless box then gets you to this big long form where you “declare under penalty of perjury” that you are indeed the authorized representative:
After that you are rather unceremoniously dumped into Facebook’s Help Center with a message up on the top saying that you will receive an email where you have to click a link to validate this new address.
I did receive that email, clicked the link and then got a message saying that I would receive additional information, presumably as they examine my claim to the page.
We’ll see what happens next.
Merging Pages?
What was strange to me in the process today was that I did not receive the message that both BL Ochman and the AllFacebook article mentioned, namely this:
“Once you have submitted the request to merge the Community Page(s) to your authenticated Page, Facebook will review your request and verify that the merge request is for two similar entities. For example, the Community Page for Nike could merge with the authenticated Nike Page, but a merge request for Nike Basketball or Nike Shoes to merge to the general Nike Page would not be approved.
Please keep in mind that the review process may take a few days, and that we may contact you if we need additional information. If we approve the request, anyone who has “Liked” the Community Page(s) will be combined and connected to your authenticated Page.”
I would like to merge the pages… in truth I’d really just like to eliminate the community page and have people go directly to our main page… but if that is accomplished by a “merge”, so be it.
Is this the next step? After I have been granted admin access to the community page will I then be able to request a merge of the two?
I don’t know… but I’ll update this post as I find out more in my own process. And if you have already gone through this process, I’d love to hear about it in the comments – please do leave one!
I’m pleased (I think) that Facebook is appearing to offer companies a way to potentially gain a bit more control over how they are represented within Facebook. I’ll be curious to see how it all really pans out… (Sorry, do I sound a bit skeptical? 🙂 )
What do you think about this? Are you going to go claim your community page? Have you already done so?
P.S. Hat tip to Donna Papacosta who posted BL Ochman’s article to, where else… her Facebook wall! (and from there I saw it)
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I tried rather unsuccessfully to claim several pages for my company. After I was dumped on the help page and told I’d get an email, I got … nothing. It’s been two weeks and nothing has come to me. I even went so far as to try claiming the pages from my home PC thinking that *maybe* my company’s overzealous filter prevented me from submitting my claim. Yet here I sit empty handed. Luckily the big wigs who set me on the task got distracted by something else shiny on Facebook and have not asked about it yet. Maybe I’ll try it again.
I created a Community Page for my organization, ignorant to the difference between Community Pages and Official Pages. Since then, I have acquired quite a few fans and have posted quite a bit of content, but I am unable to utilize the valuable features of a Official Page, such as a customized landing page. I have, however, created a vanity url for my Community Page, and I have begun advertising my vanity url.
If I create an Official Page and then merge my preexisting community page to it, I have the following two questions:
1. Can I keep my vanity url from Community Page?
2. Will all my content show up on my new Official Page?
Thanks!
I had the same experience as TonyT. I’ve tried a handful of times, but am still awaiting the “additional information”. I started this process almost a month ago. I went back to the Community Page and now the option to “claim” the page is gone. How frustrating! Any update on this?
Justine, Unfortunately I, too, have not received any further information after submitting my request back on December 2nd. And yes, I noticed that the option to claim the page is now missing. 🙁
And yes, this is extremely frustrating!
Dan
So, is there no way to currently claim the community pages? As you mentioned, the link is now missing. There is a page up for my company and it’s either claimed by someone else or by Wikipedia and I want to have some control of it.
Any new information about merging it with your official company page?
After claiming my company page a while ago (my best estimate 6 months ago) this morning I suddenly received an email from Facebook acknowledging my claim and the merging of my community page with the official company page. It seems they had somewhat a backlog to plough through.
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