Happy day for businesses! Or, that’s what I thought when I discovered this “new” feature that really isn’t so new. It turns out to be a 14 months old {side note: anyone else always amazed at how hard it is to find these helpful features in Facebook!?}
Whether large or small…you might have recently faced the need to rename/rebrand/update your Facebook Page. For marketers this is a rigorous process, but not impossible for websites through the use of 301 redirects and other best practice SEO processes. Social media, however, presents an issue.
Earlier this year, my sister and I rebranded our wedding company, Mayhar. I won’t go in to the drawn out details {perhaps that can serve as another post at a later date}, but we decided to change the spelling of our company when we branched out to include wedding planning/styling to our current line of products. From logos, new domain, 301 redirects, directory updates, etc there was a lot to consider. The major bummer, though, was Facebook.
Our Personal URL for the Facebook Page was permanent, and there was no way to update with the name change. We ultimately decided to start a new page, and lose all our fans {don’t cry too much – we only had 300 or so, but that’s a big loss for a small business}.
Fast forward to yesterday – I was poking around the “Edit Page” section of my Page and discovered that Facebook now allows you to MERGE pages that are the same! I believe this may have had something more to do with “Places” check-ins and the existence of Facebook Fan Pages for those same businesses. There is clearly a valid reason for a business to own the “Places” that individuals checks in, and merge with the Fan Page. Regardless the rationale, I am thrilled that we now have the option to merge our old fans in with the new page!
Below is a 3 step process to merging your pages…hope this helps you out in your marketing efforts. While Facebook has been moving toward monetization {that, also, is a post for another day}, I’m happy to see they are also considering new tools that help businesses as they grow and evolve.
Step1 : Select “Edit Page -> Update Info” on your Facebook Page
Step 2: Select “Request to merge duplicate Pages” from the Resources tab on the left navigation
Step 3: Complete your duplicate Page merge information!
Anyone else have any “eureka” moments that weren’t so newsworthy? I am an analytical marketer who loves improvements and feature enhancements, but I find it so hard to stay up to date with everything happening – that alone would be a full time job!
