In the past year or so, tons of media companies have been setting up their Facebook fan pages (with varying degrees of success). In this time, media companies have also been shedding staff members by the hundreds.
If any of those companies are like mine, chances are they have allowed staff members to create these fan pages using their own personal Facebook access. After all, it is the easiest way to do it. Chances are, these companies have also let go at least one person who created a Facebook fan page for their organization. Unlike user access to your in-house publishing systems and intranets, you have very little control over who has admin access to your Facebook fan pages unless you yourself created the page.
If the ex-employee in question as the creator and only admin on the page – there’s really nothing you can do except ask them to make you an admin as well. If they are feeling charitable, they might actually do it. But then there’s another issue.
As of right now, it seems there is no way to permanently remove admin privileges from the creator of a fan page. Tons of Facebook business users have been trying to get an answer to this issue to no avail. As of right now, whoever created your fan page, whether they work for you or not, has full control. If the employee parted ways with the company in a negative fashion, imagine what they could do: Post nasty or libelous status updates, send messages to all fans, delete the page altogether. Yikes, right?
Until Facebook decides to answer this long string of help requests, the best thing you can do is to not allow employees to create Facebook fan pages from their personal accounts. Instead, set up a universal staff account can be set up to create and administrate fan pages. That way a mere password change once an employee leaves your company will solve this issue.
Ron Samuelson
Looking for a solution to this problem. The business owner, not the employee/ad agency, needs to be the main admin…