Do you have a Places or Community page for your business? If so you may be at risk of your information being hijacked.
A couple of weeks ago my wife and I were looking for a place to eat on Lake Lanier, a lake just North of Atlanta. I went to Google and searched eventually clicking on a Facebook page link for Pelican Pete’s (PP’s). I went to their page to find out more information on PP’s and in the process discovered a potential flaw or potential issue to businesses relying on Places and Community pages on Facebook.
As you can see in the video below I had the ability to go into the PP’s page and edit the basic information including Tags, Address, Phone Number, and URL. Why is this an issue?
For starters let’s look at a hypothetical situation that is reasonable. Let’s suppose that I make money by using Google AdSense to display relevant ads on pages. With the ability to go into certain Facebook pages and customize the URL, I can set up a number of money making pages in Facebook by hijacking ignored Facebook Places pages and placing links to my pages with AdSense running on it.
In the case of PP’s, I simply would create a website called LakeLanierToDos.com. Under the domain I could then create a page called /pelicanpetes and place the relevant information about PP, but in the sidebar include Google Ads for other Lake Lanier businesses. Something like this:
Now imagine if you did that across 1,000 sites how much revenue you might generate by hijacking ignored Facebook places pages. Watch the Video.
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Think its just the little guys who could be hijacked? Here is a Facebook Places page for a local Starbucks in Alpharetta, GA that I was able to go in and edit their info.
So what can you do to avoid your Facebook presence being hijacked:
- Create a Company, Brand, or Product page that you have 100% control of. Avoid Community and Places accounts.
- Claim you Place. If you look below the photo in the left bar on the Places Page you will see a text link that asks “Is this your business?”. Click on the link and claim your business. From what I have seen verifying the business doesn’t prevent the ability of someone else editing your info and URL.
- Merge the Places Page with Your Company, Brand, Product, etc. page. This appears to be a good idea that has disappeared for the time being. Facebook may be changing the process and planning on reinstating the process once completed. Last info I saw (on 8/2/11) was that Facebook was not responding to questions sent on this topic. Google+ anyone?
- Create a Company, Brand, Product page, then claim your Places page and delete it. If you can’t merge the Places page then kill it.
I’d like to think that Facebook would see this post and correct the issue. But in the real world Facebook likely knows about the issue, has decided it doesn’t really care or that it isn’t a big enough issue, and has no plans to address it. Social networks move at their own speed, based on their own priorities, and I’ve yet to see one that really cares what their users think. They may exist to help the rest of us be social, but they themselves really are more interested in figuring out how to make money rather than having a conversation with you or me.
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