This evening I’ve been receiving multiple reports from the owners of large “generic” pages that Facebook is systematically disabling the ability of administrators to post status updates. For example the owner of the Facebook Page, “Sex?” let us know that he is no longer able to post status updates from within his page. There are multiple other Page owners that are now contacting us as well. We’ve received information from a number of individuals which are essentially looking to build cross-promotion networks.

Unfortunately that strategy may be in violation of Facebook’s terms and based on Facebook’s activity this evening, it appears that it doesn’t have long-term viability. Numerous brand managers have complained that generic pages damage their ability to promote their brand as it compete with Facebook. For example Pizza Hut may not have a large following but the “Pizza” page happens to have many more fans. Many of the owners behind these generic pages were using the Pages as a tool to cross promote others.

That capability has now been disabled. Instead the pages can only be used to build communities among the users but not to publish to the feed. There doesn’t appear to be a pattern for which pages are disabled but all of the reports we’ve received so far are from page owners with hundreds of thousands of fans if not millions of fans. What’s clear is that Facebook doesn’t want Pages used as a tool for spamming others just as previously occurred with Facebook groups before restrictions were implemented.

Facebook Pages present a huge promotional opportunity but Facebook doesn’t want the feed distribution to be abused. Right now the company gets a lot of traffic from the search engine optimization provided by Pages so it appears they want to avoid totally disabling all Pages. Instead they are simply opting to disable status updates.

We’re in the process of reaching out to companies that have been affected as well as Facebook and will have more to come on this topic momentarily in the morning.

Update
OraBrush, who recently acquired the generic “Kisses” page which now has well over one million users has had their publishing rights disabled. When you register to create a page, Facebook statest, “Please certify that you are an official representative of this brand, organization, or person and that you are permitted to create a Facebook Page for that subject.” I guess it’s not possible to be an official representative of a page.

Additionally the generic pages are not for brands, organizations, or people, the original things that Pages were created for.