| February 1, 2020 -- Facebook has been cleaning house!
If you’re using a Facebook Profile to market your Grange, you’ve probably been informed of the importance of converting your Face- book Profile to a Facebook Page. If you have a “profile” set-up for your Grange instead of a business/organization “Page” - you are at risk of having the Profile removed.
According to Facebook’s Community Standards (terms of service), profiles are for people only, and are not to be used for businesses, organizations, etc. These types of pages are considered “fake accounts” according to Facebook, mainly because they represent something that they are not, and once Face- book catches up with these “bad pages,” they are deleting them with little or no warning.
According to a recent article in the New York Times, “The Silicon Valley company defines fake accounts as profiles that are either designed to break its rules, for ex- ample by spammers or scammers impersonating others, or that are misclassified, such as someone setting up a Facebook profile instead of a Facebook page for a business.”
Facebook is currently in the middle of a big push to track down pages that are set-up wrong or misrepresent, and is deleting pages at a record rate. In 2018, Facebook deleted 3.3 billion fake accounts. In 2019, they shut down 5.4 billion fake accounts. Essentially, Facebook has closed down more accounts in the past year than all of the existing Facebook users world- wide. As of December 2019, Face- book has over 2 billion users, and figure that 25% of existing profiles are fake and/or misrepresent themselves.
According to Facebook, most of the recent fake accounts addressed have been taken down within minutes of being created. Therefore those accounts aren’t included in its report of active users. It claims that it flags 99.8 percent of fake accounts on its own, before they’re reported.
Granges that have set-up Profiles instead of Pages are caught in the Facebook crossfire. In most cases, they are not intentionally misrepresenting their Grange, but are just not following Community Guidelines - most likely due to lack of knowledge of how Facebook works. But if Granges act quickly, they may be able to fix the situation before Facebook deletes the profile in question.
Facebook offers a migration path to convert your profile to an actual Page. Just go to go to http://www.facebook.com/pages/create/migrate - then follow the prompts. Once your new Grange “Page” is up and running, be sure to make yourself an admin from your personal profile. (And we ask that you also make someone from the Public Relations Committee an admin as well, so that we can help you with your new Page, and also ensure that the Page follows the CT State Grange and National Grange Social Media policies.)
If you or your Grange needs assistance with navigating Facebook, please contact the Public Relations Committee. We’re here to help! E-mail: publicrelations@ctstategrange.org or information@ctstategrange.org . Don’t have a Facebook Page for your Grange and would like one? Contact the PR Committee today to get your Page up and running correctly!
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