Recently, while updating a client’s website, the webmaster called to tell me that the Facebook business page link that I had sent was not working. I re-sent the link only to have her call right back saying that that too, did not work.
I double and triple checked the link and it WAS working for me but clearly it was NOT working for her. For some reason, the page was not visible to her – it was missing!
While many people are concerned, with good reason, about the privacy settings associated with their Personal Accounts, most people that set up Business Pages on Facebook are looking for as much exposure as possible. We were adding the link to the website so that anyone could find us. This was a real concern!
First, I started asking questions. Interestingly, even though she is a web savvy woman between the ages of 12 and 99, she was NOT, in fact, a member of Facebook. Now while this was a surprise, this should NOT have been the problem as Facebook Business Pages are visible to ANYone on the internet.
Next I went thru the client’s privacy settings. Someone else had set up the Page for him before he hired me to work on it but one of the first things I had done was to confirm that the privacy settings were such that we were optimizing visibility. I double check and they were all fine.
Next I drilled down through each of the options, into areas that I was pretty sure he could not have altered but checked any way – they too, were all fine.
I then went in as the Page Admin and went to ‘edit page’. There are a number of choices here and this is where I realized that the client had, in fact, modified some of the settings!
Since his target audience (we has discussed and defined this) is 21 and older, he had changed the ‘age restrictions’ tab to be ’21 and over’. Now, this is fine within the Facebook World as he really didn’t need to have anyone under that age view his page anyway but since Facebook cannot tell the age of someone out on the web before making the page available, that setting changes the default so IT IS HIDDEN FROM VIEW by the general public!
THIS was why the webmaster, who was not a Facebook member, could not see the page! We were fortunate to have her point this out!
It all makes sense and I can see why Facebook has set it up this way, but wanted to share this adventure so that you too, realize that by changing your age restrictions tab to anything but ‘Anyone’, you limit the visibility of your page by the general public.
A quick way to check that your Business Page is in fact visible to the general public, and not just to Facebook members, is to log out of Facebook and see if you can surf over to your page. If not, check your privacy AND Page settings.
That, or call our webmaster – she is great!
