Want to set up a Facebook Page for “Pillow Fighting” or “Tatoos”? Previously, Facebook would simply shut down the Page or remove publishing permissions from the Page administrator. Now Facebook is suggesting that users create a “Community Page” when the page isn’t for a company, brand, or public figure, as well as when they are not an official spokesperson for that organization.
Prior to the release of “Community Pages”, Facebook had to constantly monitor Pages that were not created on behalf of official organizations. It became a game for many individuals to come up with Pages that would instantly attract millions of users, however organizations were getting frustrated when a Facebook user created a brand page on behalf of them.
In such cases, Facebook has removed administrator privileges from the user and given it to the brands. However, when the Page wasn’t for brands, some of the topics became instantly popular. For example, the “I ? SLEEP” Page now has over 5 million fans. Facebook doesn’t want administrators using these pages as a tool for spamming tools however so what they’ve decided to do is classify popular generic pages as “Community Pages”.
As Facebook states (pictured below):
Generate support for your favorite cause or topic by creating a Community Page. If it become very popular (attracting thousands of fans), it will be adopted and maintained by the Facebook community.
There are two important aspects of this new distinction. The first is that this new “Community Page” classification reduces the amount of effort Facebook needs to put in to policing the pages. The second is that Facebook continues to reap the SEO benefit of having these Pages created while blocking spam. While your publishing rights will be removed at a certain point, this is the new mechanism Facebook has in place to ensure that you understand what will happen if your Page happens to become popular and you aren’t an official spokesperson for the company or group.
As Facebook has come to realize that the users want to use Pages as a general “community platform” to socialize ideas and causes, they’ve decided to enable users to essentially create their own “Unofficial Pages”. Users can then meet other users who have similar ideas and interests. One strange distinction is the difference between Pages and groups. Facebook states that groups are for “professional interests or hobbies” whereas community Pages are for “causes and topics”. I’m not sure users will understand (or even care) about this distinction.
If my own opinion, this new form of “Community Pages” is pretty much identical to the idea behind Ning, except that it’s a different technical platform, and your publishing rights will be removed if the community becomes popular. Do you interact with unofficial Facebook Pages already? What benefit do you think there is from having this distinction?
Update
This is not April Fools as far as we know. You can view it for yourself.
That’s part of what makes facebook fun and friendly. Personally I have fanned nearly 900 pages and 90 groups. Most of which I just “hide” in my news feed.
Yeah !
why should everything be ‘official’ ?
It’s funny to create a ‘statement’ and see how many fans we get
I used to be a fan of thousands of pages, but all the spam started to really annoy me — so I removed every single one of them apart from those I want. The experience is much better now, and this community pages idea, well it’ll be interesting to see where it goes.
Simply just more confusion! I have a fan page for my business which is a blog. The blog topic is a movie for which of course, I do not own anything. But I do own my blog and all it’s content. So this community distinction doesn’t really make any sense to me since my page is still considered to be the “official” page for my business.
Well, we know FB is going to sell out or do something drastic with ALL of the data and users it has.
It has provided a non-techie person a voice…and a bunch of free traffic.
I suggest taking your followers to your own page or blog to prevent a “sudden death” of your follower and friends.
“If it become very popular (attracting thousands of fans), it will be adopted and maintained by the Facebook community.”
What does this exactly mean?
April fool if Allfacebook can’t back it up with a link!!
But a good idea if it does materialise
Move them over on a fortnight transition period by adding a option with the dropdown when click on the report link such as “Better suited as community/ unoffical page!”
You can check by yourself:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php
If it’s an April fool, it’s a FB one
I hope that they’ll add a way to change a previously created page into community page
Anything can be official. If I want to start the “I like to scratch my ass” page, I can make a blog called “I like to scratch my ass” and now it’s the official page of my blog, which is a real business.
And what does this mean? “If it becomes very popular it will be adopted and maintained by the Facebook community.” They take it away from you if it’s successful?
Is there a way to browse communities others have created?
I have a page with over 11,000 fans at http://facebook.com/gayrightsmedia. When I crossed the 10,000 fan mark, Facebook automatically pushed a notification warning that I would lose my admin publishing privileges for the page if I weren’t able to authenticate my relationship to it within three weeks. Since my page is a cause, The Gay Civil Rights Movement, I hope that it is designated as a Community Page and that I do not lose my admin status (Who officially represents a diverse spread out civil rights movement?). Unfortunately, no matter how often I try to authenticate my page, Facebook provides no feedback. This is causing me endless anxiety over a page and community I worked long and hard to build up and maintain. All I can do is wait and hope whoever is reviewing popular pages on Facebook isn’t homophobic.
I still don’t get the difference between Community Pages and Groups. On Community Pages will they have the power to send updates too? Will groups be able to convert to Community Pages? I think Facebook will have to make a distinct difference between Pages and Community Pages, for example. Insights, and updates, only apply for Official Pages, while Community Pages, it will be just like groups to share and communicate or even allowing the posts to show up on News Feed.
Facebook is just really annoying with all the changes to pages. Especially for nonprofits and organizations that have spent lots of time building up their pages. Many organizations became SOL after pages came out and they already invested in creating a group, so now they have a group and a page. Personally, I think facebook should change all groups into pages and allow page admins to email people who are page fans, it’s their choice to be a part of page so if they are receiving spam that’s on them.
When I search on google for, “Beyonce on facebook”, it will give me 10 different pages. However, only one is the official page and it will state that in the search. I guess the community page represents the other non-official “fan” pages. The official Beyonce page has over 3 million fans whereas, fan community pages may have from 500-5000 fans. It all depends on the popularity and distinction.
When becoming a fan of a page, most fans want to feel that they are really communicating with Beyonce, not another fan of Beyonce. Some people have become fans of people’s pages, not knowing that it’s not really the official page. I’m using Beyonce as an example because she’s very popular on facebook. There have been many other entertainers/business owners where people are using their name to create pages and they don’t truly “represent” that person. People have taken business names and logos and are claiming to represent the individuals or businesses. The community page vs official page will make that distinction more clear. The official page is similar to a patent. It’s there to protect the owner of all rights to the name and image. Some people have books based on their official page idea. The key is being able to know who’s the real owner of the idea, image, product, etc. The official page distinguishes individual owners from the community pages which is another person copying/representing another person’s idea. Another example is Mary J Blidge, Michael Jackson, Steve Harvey, etc, they each have at least 10 different pages but only one is the real “official page.”
I think the distinction between groups vs community pages is, with the community page you can instantly join and “become a fan” whereas groups like “friends” you have to request to join.
Many facebookies don’t realize how much control they are giving facebook to take their ideas. Similar to a patent, if the idea is not protected, well it gives Facebook total control over it. There are some ingenious facebook pages out there with millions of followers/fans and it’s a shame they don’t know how the pages will be used in the future by facebook or anyone else for that matter, someway, somehow, somewhere. On the other hand, facebook doesn’t own the right to entertainers and private businesses because they are already protected. Facebook has their terms of use as well as a great legal team. Unfortunately, many facebookies don’t. In order to have an “official” page it should be a legally registered business. Or else anyone can take the idea and run with it, hence, the community page.
I believe this is done in order to preserve the brand as many users create unofficial pages for brands and it becomes a branding issue for big brand when such pages become very popular..
Patrick – don’t be ridiculous (pertaining to the ‘homophobic’ bit).
Thnx a ton for your wonderful article…
My page has been charecterised as a Community Page and I was confused as to what is this… I’ve also applied to facebook for not counting it as a Community Pae but rather counting it as a Fan Page
Facebook fan page ads will suffer patronage. Who will advertise and make a page popular only for facebook to adopt it in the nearest future?
What happens when a community page gets popular? Who becomes the admin? There’s nothing in the FB help centre? Any ideas?
Does anybody know what will happen with existing pages that are generic? Can facebook take away the admin rights anytime now? Or does this rule only apply for newly created pages?
does anyone know how to send emails to all the fans on hte community pages? i made one without knowing the difference of community of fan pages. i don’t know how to send emails to all my fans at once.
This is the stupidest thing they have done! We can no longer even open up that box of “fans” to see a list of them. Bring back the old way of doing it – I want and need to see my fans base on a regular basis!!!
This is a very good way to discourage people from making official pages for things like “bubble wrap” or “chewing gum” and instead make them make pages.
I can not see being a fan of hundreds of pages ~ because when I am a fan of something I want to keep up on news ~ and could not possibly keep up with more than a dozen or so.
I think FB should charge users who create pages. Almost every bogus/scam/phishing scheme for Zynga games is listed as Local Business. There is no option to report them as Fraud ~ nor to block them. If FB was charging users, it might lessen the numbers of cheat sites using legit games logos to fool gullible into joining them.
Exactly, Rena. It must be an OFFICIALLY registered business name.
That means, NO your BLOG is NOT a business, as 2 posters implied. Unless you own the doman name and software that it is running on.
Business in the terms of one, is an establishments that has been registered at the state level – local courthouse as a C-Corp, S-Corp, LLC – Sole proprietorship, partnership respectively. And has a business license from the city hall or has filed for an EIN(employment ID) from the IRS.
As it stands, 90% of these fan pages are bogus bullcrap, made by stupid children who cannot read or belong on FB. The terms for fan pages were clearly spelled out from the beginning. If you do not own a business, get stuffed. Instead they choose to ignore that or cannot comprehend because their school system failed them. It’s about time FB did something to address this since they’re the idiots who allowed these pages to be abused in the first place by not putting restrictive protocols in place to verify each page creators credentials. You should be forced to be in or join a WORK network for your business title, then create a page.
FB also doesn’t got far enough to investiage either. How hard is it to see when a page is reported, that the admin being a snot nose HS student, is not a mayor for a city, and has no right to be running a fan page for his city government?
As to one poster saying Groups should be made pages; no thanks. My group is limited to only people in my network, meaning NO SPAMMERS or outsiders need apply as is the case with pages. But that’s something you might not know since you are most likely one of those “no network” nobodies.
FB should have stayed for college networks only. None of this would be happening if the myspace losers were not allowed in. Or the ones with less education.
if these pages weren’t meant for businesses, how do I unlink my job listing from the community page? I’d rather have my job listing go to my company’s official FB page, not this community page my company has no control over. would love somebody to point me in the right direction! Thanks.
This is how stupid Community Pages are:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/My-Password-Is/106847672669721?v=stream
They can function as a search engine for any string of words in any post around the globe!
Just create a community page whose name is the string you want to search for, and you get utter lunacy like the link above: A page called “MY PASSWORD IS”, which displays everyone’s posts from around the planet, containing the string “my password is” — plus the password they’ve chosen to share with their circle of friends, not realizing that everyone all over the world can not just see it but FIND IT using community pages!!!!
You can also find pages like: “My login is”, “My cell # is”, “a secret”, “confidential”, and you can create more — just think of any string of words that you’d expect to see in a sentence where someone is revealing something they probably shouldn’t, and you can make a Community page that displays these revelations for everyone to see.
The people in charge of Facebook privacy issues are such complete retards. I can’t believe they still haven’t plugged this hole.
IM just askin.. why not remove those fan pages that are in active or only have small amount of users active on it.. coz like one of my fan pages that im co-administrator, a lot of people likes our posts and are active on it everyday.. then you just removed our publishing rights.. maybe you can pick those who you have to remove there rights.. and pick wisely.. our page can also help you to make facebook users more active.. just sayin..