Facebook Community Pages Even Worse for Marketers

Yesterday I wrote about how the new community pages feature of Facebook made my profile less useful because it now links to a community page for various things in my profile, like the place I work, that doesn’t exist. Not being in marketing it didn’t occur to me today until I saw someone else talking about it, but for marketing folks, this is kind of a nightmare.

If you go to my profile, or hundreds of other profiles, on Facebook, there’s a link to a company’s page, but the page doesn’t exist. However, anyone who visits that page can “link” it to either the Wikipedia entry for that company, or whatever they decide to suggest as the “official” site for that company. Assuming that someone is actually checking the suggestions, do you know what information will get pulled from your website, or what information there is about your company on Wikipedia? So, whether you wanted a Facebook page for your business or not, you’ve got one now, and you may not even be the one controlling it.

Not only that, but for each potential way an employee refers to their workplace, there’s a different page! For instance, Kraft is one page, Kraft, Inc. would be another, and so on, and so on. Yes, that’s just awesome for law firms, which are commonly referred to many different ways, eh?

So, if your marketing strategy didn’t include having a Facebook community page for your business, too freakin’ bad for you. Facebook decided your strategy for you. Good luck with that.

Of course, I can see some businesses deciding that the best way to handle this is to forbid any employees from listing their workplace on Facebook, which would be a poor choice. But even then, how do you stop former employees from listing it? What leverage do you have? Somewhere, womehow, someone is going to list you in their profile, and you’ll have a page. Get used to it.

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