What I’d like to see changed on Facebook Pages – Part 1

As the lead administrator for Pollak Library’s Facebook Page, there are serious changes I would like to see Facebook make in its next upgrade or redesign to Facebook Pages. These are not cosmetic changes. These are missing features and functionality that seriously impair our ability to effectively manage our organizational Facebook Page and our relationship with Fans.

I am not alone in wanting these features, because Facebook addresses most of them on their Help Center for Page Administration:

The Ability to Change Facebook Page Names

Unlike personal Facebook Profiles, Page owners and administrators cannot change their Page name once a Page has been created. This is extremely frustrating, particularly since Facebook does not put a character limit or warning on the text field one fills out when creating a new Page name.  To “change” a Page name, owners have to delete their Facebook Page and create a completely new one.

I ran into this problem when creating the Pollak Library Facebook Page.  I initially named our Page “Pollak Library, California State University Fullerton” to fully identify our library name and proper campus name.  But, that name was so long that it distorted the Wall settings menu bar on our Page, making the Wall display weird.  The only way to fix it was to shorten our name, which is not allowed.  So, I had to delete the old Page — after fully customizing and inviting a few Fans — and re-create it with a shorter name, “Pollak Library, Cal State Fullerton.”

I would like to be able to shorten our name even further, down to just “Pollak Library”, like our Facebook username (www.facebook.com/pollaklibrary). But, that just is not an option permitted by Facebook at this time.

The Ability to Transfer Owner Rights

Back in July, when I created the Pollak Library Facebook Page, organizational fan Pages had to be tied to an existing Facebook user account (personal Profile) as the Page owner.  So, I am now considered the “owner” of our library Page.  Although I can, and have, added others in the library as Page administrators, Pollak Library currently cannot separate its Page from my personal Facebook Profile if they needed to for any reason (i.e., if I was no longer employed there).

Librarian By Day Bobbi Newman (@librarianbyday) provides an excellent explanation of the issues associated with this serious oversight by Facebook.  Now, at least, organizations can set up a business account for the sole purpose of owning and administering an organizational Facebook Page, instead of being forced to associate it with an individual user Profile like I had to do when creating our library Page.

However, until Facebook implements the ability to transfer Page “ownership”, older — pre-business-account — organizational Pages are essentially “held hostage” by the individual employee who created that Page (not that I, or hopefully any other Page owner would ever cause problems until this oversight is fixed by Facebook).

The Ability to Receive Page Alerts & Notifications

It absolutely drives me, and our other library Page administrators, nuts that Facebook does not support Notifications and Alerts for Pages like they do for personal Profiles. We have to constantly check our Page Wall to see if Fans have commented or posted on our Wall, or if users have joined our Page as a new Fan.

Can I be notified every time a fan takes an action on my Page?
Unfortunately, we do not yet provide notifications of activity on your Page. In the future we may provide alerts for certain activities on the Page.

It would make our jobs so much easier if Facebook would allow Page administrators to subscribe to notifications/alerts for Fan actions on our Pages.   In my ideal work world, members of my Facebook Page administration team could decide if they want to receive email or text alerts for all or any of these actions on our Page.

To Be Continued

Rest assured, these are not all of my complaints, I do have more suggestions, but I did not want to overwhelm you with a really long blog post.  Watch for Part 2 very soon!