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Migrating Facebook Fans to a New Fan Page

April 6, 2010 By

For various reasons, an administrator sometimes needs to change the name of a fan page; perhaps the company’s or a product’s name has changed and the current name is no longer accurate. Because Facebook does not allow admins to make changes to the name or category of their current page, an admin will have to abandon the old page and create a new page.

Yes, this means starting over from scratch. But what about your fans? How will they know that they need to “fan” a new page, and how will you convince them to do so? Here are several tips for making the migration of fans easy for everyone:

  1. Create your new page first. Do not delete your old page.
  2. Every couple days, post a status update that alerts current fans to your new page and provides the URL.

  3. Send an “update” to all fans with a link to new page. Updates are not as visible as messages, but they are the only method available for alerting all fans at once. (To send an update, go to “Edit page” and in the right column select “Send an update to fans”)

  4. Create a Static FBML tab that explains the change from current page to a new one, asking fans to go there instead.

  5. Make the tab title one that grabs attention for your current fans (who will not see default landing page), and make the tab the default “landing page” for new visitors.

  6. Also, create a landing tab on your new fan page that explains the migration.
  7. All administrators of the new page should use the “Share+” and “suggest to friends” features to promote the new page among colleagues.

  8. Create a Facebook ad campaign to target new fans and send them to your new page (go to http://www.facebook.com/advertising/?pages and the tab labeled “Find new Fans”)

  9. If you have a blog, write a post about the new fan page and ask readers to visit you there from now on, including a link, of course.
  10. Post the new link on all your websites. You can make a note of the “new” page if you like, for the first month.

You will eventually want to delete your old page. Perhaps not all of your fans will have migrated. This is unavoidable, and has its benefits. Yes, you will have to build up your fan numbers again, but you know that the ones that did follow you to the new page want to be there and are more likely to spend time on your page and interact with your content.

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  • http://www.infinitesynergy.net Anders

    Great post…I also recommend removing all tabs and interactive features of the old page. You don’t want to spread your messages and comments between 2 pages. This way the old page becomes noticeably drab, and people will understand there is something wrong. I would also recommend adding a big 200×600 bookmark that lets people know about the page change. This will be very obvious to people that are already friends that may land on the wall tab. Don’t mean to spam any links here but we just got into one page change check it out here – http://bit.ly/9ayqDm if you do become a fan, you will see how fans also really get the message.

  • http://www.xpressomarketing.com Sandi Abbott

    Loved this post! I actually have to do that for a client, so it gave me a few more ideas. Thanks!

    Sandi

  • http://www.kundigroup.com Aljaz

    Doesn’t facebook allow option to contact them and they do a migration of fans for you?

    • http://www.hyperarts.com timware

      In your dreams :)

      • Jon Morter

        They can do it. They did it for me for my RATM For Xmas No.1 fan page when someone had made a fake one. They migrated all the fans from the old one over. But I think that was a special dispensation for me

        • http://www.hyperarts.com timware

          Of course they can do it. But unless you’re an “ad partner” or otherwise very well situated in the food chain (or, perhaps in your case, defrauded), they simply won’t do it.

  • http://www.facebook.com/coffeedrinkers Zara Lockwood

    Why do you think they don’t allow changes to a page name ? – I’d like to think that at some point they will allow it – I remember when groups had the option to change names. I’ve got several pages that could do with a name change.

    • http://www.beamondcreative.com Sam Beamond

      To prevent you from creating a fanpage called “fluffy bunnies”, attracting thousands of young fans, for you to change the fan page to something like, “XXX girls”. FaceBook has to cover all their bases because of the number of nut jobs out there, who would do something like this!

  • http://Facebook-FanPage Vishakha Bharani

    Hello all,

    I have created a fan page for Indian Diabetics – [ URL deleted ]

    but I thought that there is some problem in CSS and Browser compatibility .

    Because the same page I have also created for testing purpose on our Server space – [ URL deleted ]
    which is properly displaying.

    The fanpage is properly seen in IE 6 but not on Mozilla and IE 8

    So, kindly help me out.

    The code which i used is

    • http://www.hyperarts.com timware

      Troubleshooting CSS display issues is outside the scope of this post.

  • http://www.DWDShoes.com DWDShoes

    What would you recommend to do with all the posts and pictures your old page had accumulated? Would you re-post/transfer them to the new page or not?

    Thanks for any reply, being late for this post and all.

    • http://www.hyperarts.com timware

      Whether you re-post all your old posts is really up to you. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to that. An alternative to re-posting old posts hosted on Blogger or wordpress.com would be to provide a link to the old blog for the older posts, maybe moving over the more recent and relevant ones and deleting them from the external blog and then providing a link to “archived” posts.

  • http://www.incrediblogger.net Make Money Online

    Thanks for these steps. Is there any way to select all friends while Inviting to join my new fanpage?