Word travels pretty fast. I was sitting in an educational lunch session with speaker Shama Hyder Kabani today, author of The Zen of Social Media, when she mentioned a “small” change Facebook just made this week - until now, if someone created a Facebook PAGE, it was eternally connected to the personal profile of the person who created it. And while Facebook allowed the creation of additional administrators for a page, one could never remove that original page-creator administrator.

Talk about a rock and a hard place for organizations and companies! If your marketing director created your company’s page, then later changed jobs – they would retain access to your company’s page, well, indefinitely. And if a partner or outside agency created your page, intending to hand over exclusive ongoing administration to you – oh, you’d be able to manage your page as a fellow admin, but the original creator would always be there.

So in a teeny little change that hasn’t gotten much public attention (yet!), Facebook now allows ANY page administrator to remove another administrator – INCLUDING the original page creator, as reported here on the “unofficial” Facebook resource site, www.allfacebook.com.

A Word of Caution

It’s important to understand that with current settings this opens the door for any page administrator to wantonly add and remove fellow admins – so take special care in granting administrator status to your brand’s page.

So How Do you Remove the Original Page Administrator?

Assuming you are one of the administrators for a page:

• Log into your Facebook Account
• Pull up the Facebook Page in question
• On the far left of the page, click “edit page”

• On the mid/right page column options, you’ll see “Admins” and the profile photos and names of everyone who has current administrator status, and in small type, immediately under each name the powerful little words “Remove Admin.”
• That’s it – click “Remove Admin” and you have successfully removed an administrator – even if that particular admin is the page’s original creator.

Now administration of Facebook pages can effectively be transferred, and remain under the control of their related brand/company/organization.

(Shaun Amanda Herrmann)