Recently I received an email informing me that a person at a college was upset about Facebook’s Community Pages.
I don’t know if you know what a Community Page is but they are pages that Facebook automatically creates on subjects like Cars or a college/university. Then they try and aggregate content from the official pages and unofficial pages to make a sort of moving wikipedia page. If you want to learn more, here’s another great blog post about it from CDG Interactive.
Well, the big problem is that you can’t really tell the difference between a Community Page and your Official Facebook Page so users might “like” the Community Page – which is not controlled by you – instead of your official Facebook Page.
Facebook does not see this as a problem. My friend at the other college sees this as a direct attack to his brand that he’s been building and all the work that he’s put into the site.
I think the big thing is that you can’t control the content on the Community Page. It pulls what it wants to pull and it’s automated so no one is screening the content.
For instance, their Community Page was filling up with p#rn by spammers.
I wrote him back and told him there was basically very little he could do about the community page. Someone had already associated it with the official site and the wikipedia page on this college. That’s about all you can do to a community page.
To get rid of the spammer, simply go out and flag the profile as spam. Granted you may have to look at things you don’t want to but marking them as inappropriate should get them removed. I did that to the two people spamming his page and one disappeared almost immediately.
I also sent an email out to someone I know at Facebook. I’ll let you know what they say about this.
To me, this is yet another reason to really have people engaged in social media at your college or university. Don’t drop it on one person. This is a social thing and you need everyone to help monitor and let you know what is going on. It’s a different way to market. It’s a different way to engage and it should be treated as such.
Now I better go check and see if there’s a community page about me. How about you? How do you feel about Community Pages?
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