Facebook Unofficial Pages are real and they can wreak havoc on your online reputation.
These pages are coming from one of two avenues: a Facebook user creates a page with the name of your business that exists in tandem with your official page, or a page gets created by Facebook because you don’t currently have one. Where Facebook is getting this information is pretty nebulous, but it’s happening and it’s affecting business’ online reputations!
Ensuring the reputation of your business stays intact is one of your top priorities, so let’s get to it!
Whether your company lives and breathes social media or just doesn’t bother, it’s crucial you do something about these unofficial pages. Here we dig into just why this matters to you:
1. Facebook is essentially controlling your brand’s presence and image. If this page is unclaimed then any visitor will assume you don’t have a web presence which reflects on your business as a whole. Example: A potential customer sees zero responses to comments or reviews? “Well they must not be that great at what they do in general…”
2. Reviews on these pages affect your Google ranking. The reviews are aggregated as part of your online presence, even if you haven’t claimed or even seen the page.
3. Unofficial pages potentially have erroneous business info ie incorrect business hours, the wrong address, pictures that don’t reflect your brand or product, even the wrong business name which can lead to (you guessed it) negative reviews. “I showed up and they were closed, what gives!”
4. People can leave reviews and comments on the timeline of these unofficial pages. Until you get access to these pages you can’t do anything to respond to this user generated content short of commenting on reviews and (potentially) sounding like a social media troll gone rogue! We don’t recommend the latter, instead you should find and claim those pages!
So what to do? Determining the state of your online reputation and managing that presence is what we at WebPunch live for! Any pages that fall short of representing you appropriately can and should be dealt with. Even if you don’t want a facebook page at all it can be claimed and then made private or deleted. Either way it’s imperative to find those pages, claim them, and make sure your online reputation is representative of how great your service and brand are.
Does this all sound wacky and unmanageable and something you just don’t have time for? If you’ve prioritized answering your customer emails and yelp reviews then you definitely have time to clean up your Facebook presence. We know business owners are busy so let us handle the heavy lifting required to straighten out any issues with FB or online reputation in general. So let’s get started!