Facebook is a great tool for businesses that want to increase visibility of their brand and widen their market net to cover new potential audiences.
Creating a page for your brand or business can be a good way to showcase both your product offering and your core business values, building a community and keeping them up to date with announcements and other insights.
But what happens when you come to create a business page and find that someone has already done it for you?
An unmanaged and unofficial Facebook page connected to your business can cause damage to you reputation. It gives you no control over tone of voice and marketing language and can impact customers’ faith in your brand when they don’t receive replies to messages or comments.
For all these reasons and more, Facebook has made it possible for users to make a claim again unmanaged Facebook pages, taking them back under the control of the business owner for more thorough management.
But before we share the process around claiming a Facebook page, let’s consider why these unmanaged pages exist.
Why Do Unmanaged Pages Exist?
The most common reason why a business owner may come across a page that’s linked to their business but is seemingly unmanaged and unconnected to their own marketing activity, is that a customer has created the location via a check-in.
If a customer or user checks into your business premises and no page appears to link with their check in, Facebook creates a new page for that location.
This then exists as an unmanaged page – indicated as such by the ‘Unofficial Page’ status underneath its profile cover photo.
3 Steps to Claim an Unmanaged Facebook Page
- Search for the page using your business name, or click through to the page if you stumble across it
- Select the button that reads ‘Is This Your Business?’ towards the top of the page profile
- Follow the instruction to either claim the page and start recreating and building it out, or merge it with a page you already manage
NOTE: The reason behind merging the pages and not simply having the page removed, is that if you remove the page, you also remove all activity relating to it. There may be reviews and check-ins that you want to keep, that prove high engagement with your brand and your social presence – so merging the page with one you already manage is a good way to do so.
Once you’ve submitted your claim, Facebook will likely come back with requests for evidence that you own the business and are in a position to claim the page.
Upon confirmation of ownership, you will become the page admin and will have the power to change it and ensure it is presented as an accurate representation of your brand and business!
