Well, not quite, but it feels a bit like that. No sooner did we write last week about the Facebook dilemma of too many company spaces than Facebook took care of the problem for us: it disabled our parent company Shakespeare Squared's account, deleted our fan page, and kicked us out as the only admin of our group.
Now, it wasn't so nefarious as Facebook seeking retribution on our blog post, but it still leaves us in an unfortunate position. When we at S2EO contacted Facebook trying to claim our business for the "Facebook Places" page, we received the following reply:
Facebook profiles are intended to represent individuals and should not be used to represent other entities. We recognize that this is not the issue you wrote in about, but your account has been disabled because it violates Facebook's Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.
We noticed that the profile held under this email address is being used to maintain a Facebook presence for a brand, business, group, or organization. Facebook profiles are intended to represent individuals only, and it is a violation of Facebook's Statement of Rights and Responsibilities to use Profiles to represent any other entities. We recognize that this is not the issue you wrote in about, but we will not be able to reactivate this account.
Now, we don't argue that the previous statement isn't true - at Facebook, as a company we had "Shakespeare Squared" as a profile - as a person. Why? Because back when we first created this page, you could not create a business account or page without a personal profile, as you can do now. As a standard of good business practice, we created a corporate page instead of linking to an individual profile because what happens when the person that account is linked up with changes positions, gets fired, etc? Instead of linking it to an individual's e-mail, we linked it to a generic marketing e-mail for the company (which we maintain was a smart idea, due to the fact that people who originally created and maintained these pages are either in very different positions in the company or are no longer with the company).
Now when we create pages for our clients, we use the official business pages, without creating any personal profile, because now you can do that. However, as we said, you couldn't do that three or four years ago when these pages were created. Since then, we've struggled with how to convert the followers for our company over -- the "friends" to the profile are not the same as the "fans" to the page are not the same as the "members" to the group, as we detailed last week. You can force (tag) individuals into new groups, but that seemed a little presumptuous for us, so we were at a crossroads of how to get all of our friends, fans, and followers into one place.
Well, Facebook made it easy. Without any warning or any way of correcting, fighting, or disputing this action ("Unfortunately, we are unable to offer further support for this issue."), Facebook disabled the account, deleting the personal profile, the fan page associated with it, and leaving our group without an admin.
We get it -- we should have had a business account -- but without offering an easy way to convert and/or consolidate the existing pages, we at S2EO were still debating the optimal solution. In addition, we think it's a poor choice on Facebook's part to screw over their oldest small business members (or else we would have used a business account, as we do on all of our new client accounts), and disable the account without any warning or ability to try and make things right.
The fans of our Facebook page? All in limbo. Our Facebook group? Without an admin, and absolutely no way to instill a new admin, which means our information can never be updated -- or deleted to make room for a new group.
Would it have been so hard for Facebook to give us any kind of notice so we could clean things up? A day's notice would have let us add admins so at the very least our group would be usable. I also understand it's a big company with a lot of little issues that they don't have the time, money, or manpower to support, but leaving a company without any kind of option to fight or explain their side (potentially giving us a chance to get our page back) is a bad way to do business.
Although this won't destroy our marketing campaign (we wouldn't be a very good company if this was our only outlet) it certainly puts a big damper on our own social media marketing, and leaves us wondering how best to utilize Facebook in the future.
Suggestions? Thoughts? Leave them in the comments below!
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