Facebook Will Screw Your Business

As if the latest Facebook debacle wasn't enough, it has recently come to our attention that if you have a business page and did not set it up correctly when you originally set it up, well, you're screwed.

As frustrated as the woman is in the photo to the left, I'm even more pissed off. It astounds me that a company (Facebook) would NOT tell their business owners EXACTLY what each page TYPE means. I'm emphasizing "type" because that is the crux of the issue that we're going to dive into today.

Monday started like any other day here at the office, get some coffee (man, I love coffee. Maybe more on that in another post) started pulling up various news resources, keyword research, reporting, software updates, a training scheduled for later in the day, a typical office day. One of the tasks for today was to check in our our on-going review and reputation managment sources to see how we are doing and if we need to address any issues or just bask in the glory of a job well done.

"Choose Your Page Type Wisely"

As I'm checking on some of the local listings, you know stuff like YP, Yelp, BBB, Google, etc. to see if the location information is all correct and up to date (you do this regularly as well, right? If not, you should) I notice that our local listing for Facebook is non-existent! Huh? How's that possible? I'm 1000% sure that we have a Facebook page, I'm also 1000% sure we post to it every day. I'm also 1000% sure we even have some really nice reviews and that our profile is filled out completely. 

I head on over to the book of faces and just double check the page, to be sure. Yep. Just as I suspected, everything is there. So then what gives? Time to do some digging.  I searched all over the place looking for a reason why a completely filled out "Company, Organization or Institution" page would NOT be showing up as a local listing. Then I stumbled upon this over at Moz:

• The name, address, and phone number (NAP) listed on the page must be an exact match with the listing in Moz Local.
• The primary phone number listed must be a unique local number or a toll-free number.
• The primary page category must be “local business”.
• A minimum of 2 visitor check-ins are required. Not sure what to do here? Head to Facebook's resources to see how to let people check in and how you can check in.
• The page must be fully accessible to all potential visitors, so any restrictions based on age, location, etc. must be disabled. This can be easily checked by attempting to view the Facebook page in a Chrome incognito browser while not logged into a Facebook account; if you can view the page normally in these conditions, the accessibility should be in good shape!

See the difference? Here's a screen shot of the "create a page" page:

As you can see, you have 6 choices. Only one of them will work for local listing verification. The first one, "Local Business or Place". I can't be the only one that chose "Company, Organization or Institution" when signing up as we, are, in fact, a company. Here is the part that infuriates me, you CAN NOT CHANGE THE PAGE TYPE! It's just not possible. Once created, that's it. Your only recourse now is to DELETE your page and recreate a new one. I could be wrong but, this is 2018 and social networks are nothing new. You can change every other aspect of your page, profile, whathaveyou but, not the TYPE. Ugh.

So you may be saying, hang on a second, I know I've read somewhere before that you CAN change the type. You'd be wrong. You can change the category but, that has no effect on the page type. I've read at least a dozen different Q&A's, Facebook support tickets, community comments and the like. Facebook doesn't seem to quite understand the issue:

​A Page's "type" is known as the Page category. An admin or an editor of the Page can change the category in the about section of the Page. Our Help Center has the steps you'll need to follow to make this change:

You can view the insanity for yourself over on Facebooks Business Community 

What's the big deal? Well, as it turns out, depending on what type of page you have also depends on how you show up in the news feed. A local business will show up more often among folks that are 'local' to your page. The other page types don't show up as often and your advertising costs on Facebook will likely be more. It's no secret that it's already tough to get your pages content to show up in the news feed, having the wrong page type will just make it that much harder.

So what do we do? How can we make it right? Well as I've already stated you can delete your page and start over. What if you have a ton of followers and reviews? You can try to create a new page and name it something slighly different (to start) then request that Facebook merge the two pages together. Now, whether or not you trust that they'll merge the old page to the new page correctly (meaning they retain the local business TYPE) is totally up to you. The other thing to consider is how long it may take for them to merge the pages, I have no idea on a time frame but, my guess is they will be in no real hurry.

​If you do choose to creat a new page just remember which TYPE to choose:

As for me, I haven't decided yet which way to go. We have a nice following and some reviews, maybe we can create a new page and direct folks over to the new one. I'm not sure. What would have been super nice is if Facebook would tell you a bit more about each of the six choice before you pick one. If you're having trouble with anything or have some other ideas, comment below. If you need your local listings checked out for you and you want to gain a positive online review/reputation profile. We've got you covered. 

Best Regards,