Face Off With Facebook on Business Pages and Privacy

We coaxed our very own Jim Bail from the comforts of his warm and cozy cave and challenged him to create some Facebook business pages for us. This is his story...

Part 1 (of 2)

I recently spent some time setting up Facebook pages for Artgig and Artgig Apps. Although our original profile predates (I think) Facebook's policy, I discovered that it's an official no-no to set up your company as you would a personal profile. Facebook has “Pages” for that. Being one of the seven non-Facebook users on the planet, it turned out to be an interesting endeavor for me.

As part of the process, I needed to hide our long neglected personal profile. We still do use it from time to time for app development, so despite the fact that the content has little to do with Artgig proper, we needed to keep it around. We have some pretty interesting and entertaining friends, but unfortunately their updates don't make great fodder for a company presence aimed at marketing...so sorry, but you won't be seeing the breaking news on our wall when the Auto-Tune remix of Crazy Badass Honey Badger drops.

Setting up pages was a somewhat confusing process in of itself, which I won't detail here. But for those thinking of setting up a company page, I'll save you 10 minutes of searching for where to do it because it's not obvious: set up Facebook Pages

Once our company pages were in place ( http://www.facebook.com/pages/Artgig-Studio/176154829099838 and http://www.facebook.com/pages/Artgig-Apps/183056311741030?ref=ts ) I turned my attention to hiding our original profile. That's where things really got interesting.

General Privacy Settings – Fine Grained Fun:

There are about 20 individual privacy settings available and no way to bulk update them aside from reverting back to Facebook's recommended settings. And it gets better. Not only do you have to set them all one by one, but opting not to share a particular item with anyone requires an extra step, as it's a custom setting. So with a few exceptions, setting each item requires going through two sets of drop down menus to turn sharing off completely i.e. 5 clicks per item. The end result is that 70+ clicks are required to turn off all sharing in your basic privacy settings. Of course you're probably still sharing all kinds of info despite all of that...

Stay Tuned for Part 2: Apps, Ads and Adventure...