Lost Access to Your Business’s Facebook Brand Page?

News » Resources » Lost Access to Your Business’s Facebook Brand Page?

Lost Access to Your Business’s Facebook Brand PageTLDR: When technology outpaces the ability to support its customers and doesn’t provide a channel for human support, outcomes can be less than desirable.

With its foray into the world of ads, Facebook unleashed several products for brands and business both on Facebook itself as well as on Instagram. Facebook Pages for local businesses and brands have been around for years however increasingly there are disconnects between its user base and Facebook, particularly in the way of building that community.

Scaling in this modern world of technology attempts to lower the cost of human capital while serving as large of a customer basis as possible. Some companies have been successful in finding a decent balance, others have tried to a certain degree (think Amazon chat for customer service while Amazon support for merchants selling on its platform leaves much to be desired). And then we have Facebook. Facebook has decided that its business customers really should not have a way to interface with anything beyond articles. The few mechanisms for reporting a problem are a one-way street while phone support for brands and companies only happens if you have a large footprint and does not apply the majority of companies trying to understand how Facebook truly fits into their marketing sphere.

So, let us get into it. Here are real-life scenarios confronting businesses who have little or no remedy and the system design folks at Facebook seem to have overlooked:

  • Once upon a time someone long, long ago setup an initial Facebook business page (back in the day when you do not actually have to have users as admins on Facebook pages) and that person has since left leaving little in the way of recovering it.
  • One of our favorites: Only one user was an admin on a Facebook business page that attracted hundreds of thousands of followers; they were banned, or their personal account was used in a manner that violated Facebook’s terms of use, causing the personal account to be permanently disabled, orphaning the Facebook brand or business page.

Now there are lots of dated online articles that make references to the elusive Facebook chat support for business but in our experience, this is not going to be an avenue available to the average user. Other outlets recommend submitting a report to the Facebook IP team in hopes that it will get passed onto the Facebook page admin group.

Now, the very idea that the de facto channel to address the scenarios above (and others) is to file a trademark/IP abuse report is just astounding but it does not take more than a quick Google search to see that this is one of the most popular methods used today. While it may work in some or many cases, this avenue is somewhat risky in that the team reviewing those requests have been known to misunderstand them and arbitrarily disable brand assets across both Instagram and Facebook properties.

It would be great to see a change in vision from leadership in the technology space. Technology is amazing. It has the potential to truly transform the lives of people but change shouldn’t outpace the people or the businesses that it is intended to serve.

IQComputing on