Facebook's community page muddle

Facebook recently changed how user profiles are presented. They now include neat little links, including to the University you work for or study at. This seems like a nice enough feature on the surface, but Facebook have really botched the implementation.



One would reasonably expect that if an official page sharing the name of your employer or university exists that it would be the page Facebook would link to. That's what happened for me, and I thought "Great, lots more traffic to our page and maybe some more 'likes' :)".

But, unfortunately, Facebook doesn't always link to our official page. Indeed, it usually doesn't. Instead, Facebook often creates a link to one of the vast number of 'Community' pages that it has automatically created. There are so many that I gave up counting them. These pages pull in combinations of Wikipedia content about the University, posts from other University pages and even public posts by ordinary Facebook users that mention the University. I'd probably quite like some of that functionality for our official page, but nope, we just get lots and lots of duplicate pages to confuse users - thanks Facebook!

Most of these Community Pages only have a few 'likes', but some are into the low hundreds. These 'like' counts will surely climb as users follow the links from profiles. We can 'claim ownership' of some of the Community Pages, but there are no docs about what happens if we do and Facebook's support forums feature folk nervous about pressing the button in case it impacts a pre-existing official page. Facebook apparently used to provide a 'Suggest the official page' option on Community Pages, but it's no longer there (it was mentioned in a couple of blog posts when community pages launched). So as far as I can tell, there's nothing we can do.

So, if there's nothing we can do, what's the point of this post? I guess I've several vague goals:

1. To highlight that if you want to 'Like' us on Facebook then be sure to do so on our official University of York page (if your profile has auto-linked to something else, I don't think there's an easy way to fix that unfortunately - the only workaround I've seen is a bit geeky)
2. To contribute to a groundswell of dissatisfaction being expressed by page owners everywhere. Facebook have done none of us any favours with this and hopefully will soon fix it.
3. On the offchance that I've missed something and anyone in our small band of readers can help, to say we'd love to hear of a way to fix this ourselves - please get in touch if you've any tips!