Change must be in the air – we’ve received this question (paraphrased below) three times this week at [email protected].
We have a Facebook fan page for our business. The employee who created the page left our company recently and no longer wants to be listed as an administrator on our page. Also, our company isn’t comfortable having her listed as an admin since she’s no longer held to our guidelines, etc. How can we remove her as the administrator?
Are you sitting down? There’s good news and bad news. The bad news can be a little hard to take.
You can’t delete the page creator.
From Facebook’s Help section on Pages for Businesses:
Q. How can I transfer Page admin rights?
A. There is currently no way to take away admin status from the creator of a Page.
Ridiculous, right? You build up a page with thousands of active fans and the VP of marketing who created the page leaves the company. Your options are to leave the person as an admin or to delete the page. Not a good choice.
Fortunately, the page creator can delete themselves assuming that another admin has been added. To remove yourself as the administrator of a page you created:
- Log in to Facebook.
- Navigate to the page.
- Click Edit Page on the upper left side beneath the page logo.
- Scroll to the Admins listed in the left column. If there is only one admin listed, add another. You must be friends with the person you select as an admin.
- Click Remove Admin to remove yourself as the administrator of the page.
What’s the solution for companies creating pages?
- After the page is created, add another admin. Have the original admin remove themselves. Now, since the creator is no longer attached to the page, no one “owns” it and all admins are on equal footing.
- Always have more than one admin in place.
- Ensure that you have social media guidelines in place before creating a page. The guidelines should stipulate a procedure for the handover of all accounts, from social networks to media outlets and third-party tools such as HootSuite and TweetDeck.
As Facebook’s Terms of Use prevent you from having multiple personal accounts or having a business registered as a personal account, there isn’t a way, within the rules, to avoid the “creator owns the page” issue. The issue becomes even more complex if the company hires a social media company to do the page building process for them. When hiring a company, ensure that the contract stipulates how the accounts will be managed, transferred and maintained, especially when the monthly retainer ends.
Got questions? Send them to us at [email protected] and we’ll feature them in a future post.
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