This morning, Mashable published an article that discusses how Facebook page admins can hijack the pages from the original owners. We have talked about this before with the strong caution of “Be careful who you appoint as admin.” As far as I know, this has always been the case. Whoever creates the page can add other admins who can then delete them as the admin. What I didn’t realize is that the Facebook FAQ’s erroneously state that the original creator cannot be removed as admin.
I have mixed feelings about the deleting of the page creator as an admin issue. I create many Facebook pages for businesses. That is one of the services that we offer. We create specialty landing pages and can even post status updates for companies who need that type of service. When I provide this service, I always add the business owner as an admin. I make sure that any other admins that are added are ones that the business owner trusts to not hijack the page or do other damage to the brand. Also, if something were to happen to me, someone else needs to be able to take over. They also need to be able to remove me as an admin if they choose. Makes sense.
On the other hand, let’s say that the page creator is the actual business owner. The business owner appoints an employee to keep the page up to date. The employee leaves for one reason or another and decides to delete the business owner as the admin. In that case, it is not good that the employee is able to hijack the page. This happens all the time and, unfortunately, Facebook is not great at helping these issues get solved.
Another issue is that once someone is an admin, they can assign other admins, ones that you may not approve. I have seen this happen to a friend. She assigned someone she thought was a friend to be an admin. That “friend” then assigned someone else as an admin. That additional admin hijacked her page.
Obviously, there are two sides to this argument, and the arguments on both sides are good ones. I think you have to go back to using common sense. Do your due diligence on knowing who you can trust. One suggestion was to have everyone who is an admin (including the original creator) be required to sign in with a company email. The thought behind that is that you can always go back to the email and get access to the page. However, if you are using a social media consultant, such as me, I sign in with my own email and have over 50 pages that I administer. By signing in as myself, I am able to access all of the pages under that one account.
Fortunately, I have been doing this a while and have built a strong trust reputation. I am always glad for businesses to check out what work I have done. In fact, I think they would be crazy if they didn’t do a little research. This is a tough call for Facebook. What do you think?
