Pixelrage.net

One thing that ticked me off in the airport was checking my email to see the following auto-email from Facebook: “Your Page has been recategorized as a Community Page.” Uh oh. I’ve heard about the Community Page rumor in early April, and it seems to have come to fruition…on my own page.

Here are the Cliffs Notes on Community Pages: for quite awhile, anyone was able to throw together a Facebook Page and foster ridiculous numbers of followers (called “fans”) in a short amount of time, thanks to 400+ million Facebook users, and good old viral-ness. Many of these pages were associated with brand names and trademarks not belonging to the page owner. This pissed off a lot of companies who wanted a strong presence on Facebook, but were thwarted by the numerous Facebook Pages that already existed for their brand. Hence, Facebook came up with the idea to turn those lay-person owned Facebook Pages into a new concept called Community Pages, which doesn’t appear to have much repercussion, until you look under the hood…

What Community Page Conversion Means for Your Facebook Page

Regardless if your page has anything to do with a brand (i.e., Coca Cola, McDonalds, etc) or not – it’s now subject to being found by Facebook and converted into a Community Page. What this does is it differentiates your page from an official corporate-owned page. It doesn’t appear to look like anything visual has happened with the Facebook Page. You’re still the admin and can edit it. It still has the “vanity URL” (facebook.com/mypage), and nothing else has been edited to the look and feel of the page. However, once you cross a certain undefined threshold – for instance, a million fans – the page gets ripped from your clutches and released to the community, where it will be treated like a Wikipedia page for all to edit. You lose — good day sir. (Kudos if you got that movie reference).

What’s really unfair here is the prospect of losing your baby, even if you did nothing to upset the corporate gods and their trademarks. So, your “I like picking my nose and sticking it on a basketball” page might become community-run if it becomes too popular. Why? It really makes no sense. The TOS for Facebook Pages say that they’re supposed to represent a brand, company, famous person or similar, but Facebook Page culture has shown it to evolve into a modern day meme, where pages represent the old “did you ever notice…” humor that many people can’t resist becoming a fan of.

By the way, the word “fan” has been ax’ed for the word “like.” So, you’re not getting “fans” to your Facebook [Community] Page anymore, you’re getting “likes.”

What a Facebook Community Page Looks Like

You might have already seen a Facebook Community Page without even knowing it: ever since Facebook made a major update to segregate your profile’s “Likes and Interests” sections into categories like “activities,” “interests,” “music,” “books,” and so forth, many of the generic Facebook Pages you once fanned have now become Facebook Community Pages. A few examples are “small business owner,”  “80s” and “cigars.” Notice how all of these pages have a permanent fixture at the top of the page:

Our goal is to make this Community Page the best collection of shared knowledge on this topic. If you have a passion for Cigars, sign up and we’ll let you know when we’re ready for your help. You can also get us started by suggesting the Official Facebook Page.

Do you think the original people who created and maintained these generic pages for years have gotten pissed at the fact that those pages are now public hubs, controlled by Facebook? Yeah, super pissed is my guess.

Protesting Your Facebook Page’s Conversion

If you feel that your page was unjustly targeted, you can protest the change to a Community Page, but it all comes down to having to state your Page’s business credentials, as you can see.

This is only good news for big corporations, looking to secure their vanity URLs and identity online. I can’t really talk that situation down, as I’ve worked in the corporate world to get back cybersquatted vanity URLs, and I own one for my own business. I also openly hate socialsquatters, which I’ve talked about many times before.

With your new knowledge of the Facebook Community Page fiasco scenario, know that your casual viral campaign days may come to an end, and put more of your attention on official business-related Facebook Pages. That’s where the security’s at. Also, if someone pilfered your Facebook vanity URL, it’s never been a better time to wrestle it back!