It’s not uncommon for a business to have an Unofficial Facebook page—it’s also common for such pages to frustrate and annoy business owners. An Unofficial Facebook page is a business page that appears to be a legitimate page for your company only it wasn’t created by you, it contains incorrect information, and it isn’t active or updated. These pages are problematic because they are a poor representation of your business’s social outreach.
These pages are usually generated when a Facebook user checks into a business before they can find the Official Facebook Page or before one has been created. Instead, Facebook generates its own Unofficial Facebook page for that person to check into.
If there is an Unofficial Facebook Page for your business, you’ve got a few options: Claim, Merge, or Remove.
1) Claim The Page
In the screenshot above, you can see the words “Unoffical Page” underneath the feature image. Right next to that you’ll see “Is this your business?” All you need to do is click this button and Facebook will take you through some simple steps (see below) to verify that this is your business.
2) Merge Duplicate Pages
You may want to do this if the Unofficial Facebook page has tons of followers and activity that you’d like to meld with your Official Facebook page. Follow the steps below to merge duplicate pages.
- Get ownership of both pages.
- Go to https://www.facebook.com/pages/merge/.
- Select the two pages you want merged, click “submit” and wait for Facebook approval.
3) Remove The Duplicate
- In order to get rid of an Unofficial Facebook page, your business must first have a claimed Facebook page.
- Open the Official and Unofficial pages simultaneously in two separate windows.
- Go to the Official Facebook page and click on the blue text link in the middle on the right side of your page that reads “Suggest Edits”.
- Scroll all the way to the bottom of the Suggest Edits page. You will see “URL” in gray text and also a button that reads: + Add Duplicate URL.
- Click over to the window with the Unofficial Facebook page and copy its URL (command/CTRL + C).
- Click back on the window with your Official Facebook page and paste the URL you just copied from the Unofficial Page (Command/CTRL + V).
- Click the blue “Save” button (see image above).
- Check back in 3-5 days to see if the Unofficial Page has been removed. If it remains, repeat all of these steps until you see that Facebook has removed the Unofficial Page for your business.
Easy stuff, right? Here’s to spring cleaning and knocking out those Unofficial Facebook pages that aren’t helping your online reputation. Take a few minutes and follow these steps to Claim a page if you don’t already have one, Merge your page with another, or just Jab out the duplicate page altogether. And while you’re there, don’t forget to like us on Facebook!
