Did you know that Facebook will allow anyone to create a Facebook Company Page? With someone else’s – maybe your – brand?
Facebook believes in open networking. There are few constraints on Facebook as a default, and when you create a personal profile or company page if you want to protect your privacy you can adjust your settings to suit.
When it comes to Facebook Company Pages, anyone with a profile on Facebook can create any company page. This is much different than LinkedIn, which requires that you have in your settings a verified email address that uses the domain name of the company you are going to create (e.g. if I want to create a page for Any Company, I will have to have in my profile a verified email address of jennifer@anycompany.com).
The reason for Facebook’s more open policy is that it allows – perhaps even encourages – “fans” to create pages to support an organization, cause or brand. Regardless, you may want to create a branded Facebook page that you can manage and control. You have a choice as to whether others can post to your company page or only your designated administrators.
If someone has created a page with your brand, you can ask the creator of the page to take the page down, or you can try to support their fan page. See Erno Hannink’s blog post, Someone created a Facebook business page with my business name and it wasn’t me, to get more ideas on how to handle this.
When you go to set up your page, you may find that there are other Facebook pages with your company name. Keep in mind that some may have been created when well-intentioned employees set up their personal profiles and said they worked for your company. If Facebook doesn’t find a company page with the name the employee(s) enter (perhaps they use an abbreviation for the company name), it will create one automatically. See my blog post, B2B Marketers: It’s Time to Claim Your Facebook Company Page, for how this happens and what you can do about it.
So, why not set up your Facebook Company Page now? With over 1 billion users, it gives you an opportunity to get some messaging in front of your audiences and their friends to attract and engage them with your brand. If you need help with your Facebook company page, contact New Incite at 818-347-4248 or by email. We look forward to helping you!
