UPDATE: Discussion around this post is happening over at Govloop.

Facebook recently unveiled its new format for Pages. Now, each organization or business presence must take the form of a Page, which is designed to look and operate much like a personal Facebook account, and which — a crucial point — must be linked to a personal profile. Facebook is adamant that all Pages must be tied to personal profiles, which in turn are tied to actual people. This means no “dummy” accounts using other email addresses. Facebook has apparently begun enforcing this rule, reportedly blocking access to some Pages that appear to be tied to dummy profiles.

The old format for Pages was problematic for government agencies on several levels. This new Page format leaves some of these problems unresolved, compounds others, and creates a few new ones. Fortunately, it would be simple for Facebook to address these concerns with a few technical quick fixes, while still preserving the general structure of linking pages to personal profiles.

1. ALLOW USERS TO PASSWORD-PROTECT PAGES. One argument Facebook makes in defense of its rule requiring government agencies link their Page to a personal profile is that it is a poor security practice to use one username and password and share that among Page administrators. Respectfully, compared to the Facebook-approved alternative, this is nonsense. People log in to their personal Facebook pages at home, at work, on their phones — just about everywhere. Linking their Pages to their profile means that if their account is compromised, their Page is compromised, which is a major fear for agencies. Creating a dummy account using a separate username and password and only logging into that account at the office greatly reduces this risk of compromise, but this is verboten. A simple option allowing users to require a password be entered when switching from a profile to a Page would be an easy lift and would go a long way toward addressing this issue.
2. CREATE A TIERED PAGE ADMIN STRUCTURE. Currently, anyone listed as an admin on a Page has equal power to post, to delete other admins, and even to delete the Page. This greatly increases the risk that a single security breach of the sort outlined above can have devastating results for an agency Page. Allowing one admin to be designated as primary, and the only one with the power to add and remove other admins and delete the Page, would be a good step.
3. DON’T USE THE NEWS FEED ALGORITHM ON GOV PAGE WALLS. The Facebook News Feed algorithm that intrinsically ranks content and moves the most “important” posts to the top is a brilliant, creative invention that has no place on government agency Page walls. In most cases, the order in which content is posted to these Pages is important, and administrators and users want the most recent post to appear at the top. I’m confident that turning this feature off on government Pages would be very well received by agencies and citizens alike. Currently I believe that setting the Wall tab default display to “Only Posts by Page” turns off the algorithm, but then you’re effectively hiding your community of users’ posts from new visitors to your Page.
4. ALLOW GOV PAGES TO ADD A DIFFERENT EMAIL ADDRESS FOR NOTIFICATIONS. Another unfortunate outcome of the requirement that Pages be linked to personal profiles is that administrators are faced with having to choose between receiving notifications from their Page in their personal email inbox, or not receiving them at all. How hard would it be to add an option that allows admins to identify another, official government email address to receive Page notifications? I’m guessing not very.
5. ALLOW “DOWNLOAD YOUR DATA” OPTION FOR PAGES. Records management with regard to social media is a bit of a gray area, to say the least. Federal agencies must preserve any original content they post to their Facebook page, but what about comments? Should comments that go unaddressed be treated differently than comments that receive a reply? What about comments that must be removed, or that include PII (personally identifiable information)? And in what format must this content be preserved? Agencies need to grapple with these questions, but allowing administrators to download all the data from their Pages the same way they can for their profiles could dramatically streamline this process, saving a lot of time and frustration.

It is clear that Facebook is interested in innovation, authenticity, and constant improvement in order to provide a better user experience. If they are truly committed to this in the government space, they ought to consider implementing these relatively easy fixes to the new Page format.

Please feel free to leave any additional thoughts on changes that could be useful for government agencies in the comments.