Today, social media titan Facebook has announced that it will remove all automatically generated App profile pages on February 1st, 2012. Now, Facebook will provide transfer option to the admin of the Facebook pages to shift the Likes of product/app pages to some other page owned by the same admin. Which means admin can transfer their likes to a relevant fan pages. It will also give admin the ability to publish the updates from new Facebook pages as they do currently.
Although, App profile pages will look similar to fan pages, but it will not allow admins to receive notification about users post or comments. Also, admins are not allowed to use Facebook as a page. The new pages will have different User Interface compare to fan pages and insights are assessed differently.
Facebook has also announced that if admins doesn’t take any action before February 1st, 2012, their App profile pages will get deleted and all profile pages traffic will directly sent to the admins app.
Personally, I think such step will create aggressiveness in the mind of users as well as admins. They will either delete their account or will stop using Facebook for ever. This might result in increase of complaints on Facebook, which is currently going through rough patches.
On the other hand users will get perplexed when Facebook search option will direct them to app pages not to app itself. Sometime users writes on the app pages instead of the corresponding fan pages expecting reply from admin. Going further, they might get irritated due to no response from admin as,with the new functionality, admins will not be notified about the activity of the users.
Facebook has done several changes in past few months and has faced several criticisms for doing such changes. It has also registered rise in complaints since users are not satisfied with the changes Facebook has brought in.
In next few weeks, admin of Facebook pages will get a notification on their app profile, which tell them to migrate Likes to an existing Facebook pages. For transfer of likes to pages, name and category of the beneficiary page must match. It has also said that no content, including wall posts or photos, will be transferred and admins are requested to download their photos, posts, insights and any other material which they want to keep. Once the migration button is pressed the App profile pages will be deleted permanently.
The like migration will take up to 7 days and it might be several hours before one see any changes.
Hope the new changes will be welcomed by users. Do you think that the move will make any significant different in business logic of Facebook as a business network ? Do let us know in comment section.
For Graph API changes click here.
Interesting. Thanks for the article. I have not formed an opinion as of yet, I think I would need some time to ponder the impact good or bad.