(Un) Official Facebook Pages – what should you do?

McDonalds recently squeezed past Pizza Hut and now has the most fans for a fast-food chain on Facebook. On August 28th they added a staggering 400,000 fans, despite fairly infrequent updates to the page. They made a few updates on July 1st, then the wall was left idle until another update on August 14th. So why the big increase?

Inside Facebook highlights that the surge in fans may be down to the fact that McDonalds merged ‘unofficial’ pages into its official fan page. Facebook actually makes it fairly easy for a brand to regain ownership of unofficial brand pages. If you find a brand page that’s already been set up unofficially, you just have to confirm your identity to Facebook and they will transfer admin rights over to you.

Question is, is this the right thing for a company to do? Earlier in the year, Coca Cola became the second most popular page on Facebook (second only to Barack Obama), yet again it was an unofficial page. Coca Cola’s answer was to partner with the two creators of the page (who were in no way associated with the company) and the pair continued to maintain it. This was, in my opinion, absolutely the right move by Coca Cola. The page had grown so signficantly for a reason and they were right not to rock the boat too much. It was run by real fans and at some stage as a company, you have to admit that in the platform of social media, you may not necessarily be the right voice for your brand. The grassroots approach has always been key to social media and the fact that 2 fans managed to build the second biggest business page on Facebook proves this.

My advice to companies in this situation is to work with the people who have established a social media presence for you – if they’re doing this in their spare time and creating an online community for you, get them on your payroll! Companies that have already done this show a deeper understanding of the social media space than most.

The agents behind Cristiano Ronaldo deleted the unofficial Facebook page that had been set up by a fan. They sent a rather curse email to the creator instead of choosing to work with them and keep the page going in a more official capacity.

There should be a middle ground here. While I don’t agree that Facebook should allow companies to delete Facebook pages, you do also have to consider that companies or celebrities do have a public image to maintain and issues of libel etc.. must be taken into consideration. The approach that Coca Cola took is absolutely spot on and the hope is that companies catch on to this and learn to work with fans, not against them.