Facebook doesn’t allow Brands to Rebrand

We admit. We are facing a Facebook page identity crisis. Our page is titled ‘Penn Olson Marketing Fanatics’. It isn’t exactly the right name for a tech blog.

As a loyal reader, you would notice a huge change in our content focus. We started out as a general tech marketing blog but now have switched our focus to Asia. We realized the need to differentiate ourselves from the giants. No point competing head on huh?

To all these changes, I wouldn’t say they are mistakes. It is just part of the process of growing and adapting to challenges. Our journey has been great so far.

I’m looking at our Facebook page and can’t help but feel sore about it. Facebook doesn’t allow us to change our page title and apparently, we are not the only one facing this problem.

On the Facebook Help Center discussion board, Audra Pakalnyte, a Facebook page administrator, said “I am facing the same problem, we got over 19,000 fans and now re-branding our name. Need to change the name of the fanpage, any of you got any positive response?”

Dianne Roces, another administrator echoed, “Same here. I just noticed now after having about 1,000 fans that our company name is misspelled. Last word was ‘Services’ it should be ‘Service’ only. Help!”

Facebook solution to this? You can change your page name only if you have less than 100 ‘Likes’ on your page. Otherwise, you have to recreate your page. I mean with so many geniuses in the company, is this all Facebook can offer to brands wanting to rebrand? After spending years building a community on Facebook, it’s hard to call for a switch. I can understand that. Twitter on the other hand allows anyone to change the Twitter handle. Now, that is smart. It allows brands to rebrand and progress with the same account.

On a fair note, Pat Askert, a commenter explained “Facebook only did it to stop people from changing names to a porn or spam site once the fan base was high enough.” However, this isn’t a strong enough reason to disallow us from changing our page titles. “There is a report function to report abuse. Come on Facebook, get with it,” he further commented,

We’re staying put on our current Facebook page. I believe Facebook will allow brands to edit our page titles one day. Do us a favor by sharing this post on Facebook. Hopefully, it goes widespread enough to gain the Facebook’s team attention. I will also be writing to Facebook to resolve this issue as well. Thanks for the support.