Change must be in the air – we’ve received this question (paraphrased below) three times this week at askp3@pixelpointpress.com.

We have a Facebook fan page for our business. The employee who created the page left our company recently and no longer wants to be listed as an administrator on our page. Also, our company isn’t comfortable having her listed as an admin since she’s no longer held to our guidelines, etc. How can we remove her as the administrator?

Are you sitting down? There’s good news and bad news. The bad news can be a little hard to take.

You can’t delete the page creator.

From Facebook’s Help section on Pages for Businesses:

Q. How can I transfer Page admin rights?

A. There is currently no way to take away admin status from the creator of a Page.

Ridiculous, right? You build up a page with thousands of active fans and the VP of marketing who created the page leaves the company. Your options are to leave the person as an admin or to delete the page. Not a good choice.

Fortunately, the page creator can delete themselves assuming that another admin has been added. To remove yourself as the administrator of a page you created:

1. Log in to Facebook.
2. Navigate to the page.
3. Click Edit Page on the upper left side beneath the page logo.
4. Scroll to the Admins listed in the left column. If there is only one admin listed, add another. You must be friends with the person you select as an admin.
5. Click Remove Admin to remove yourself as the administrator of the page.

What’s the solution for companies creating pages?

1. After the page is created, add another admin. Have the original admin remove themselves. Now, since the creator is no longer attached to the page, no one “owns” it and all admins are on equal footing.
2. Always have more than one admin in place.
3. Ensure that you have social media guidelines in place before creating a page. The guidelines should stipulate a procedure for the handover of all accounts, from social networks to media outlets and third-party tools such as HootSuite and TweetDeck.

As Facebook’s Terms of Use prevent you from having multiple personal accounts or having a business registered as a personal account, there isn’t a way, within the rules, to avoid the “creator owns the page” issue. The issue becomes even more complex if the company hires a social media company to do the page building process for them. When hiring a company, ensure that the contract stipulates how the accounts will be managed, transferred and maintained, especially when the monthly retainer ends.

Got questions? Send them to us at askp3@pixelpointpress.com and we’ll feature them in a future post.

Related posts:

1. Ask P3: Should I cross post content from my Facebook fan page to my friends?
2. Ask P3: Using WordPress to build a website with a static home page
3. Ask P3: How do I give credit for links I share?

I’ve had the pleasure of teaching a month-long course for small business owners and marketing executives that demonstrates, hands-on, how to use WordPress to build and manage a complete website. My students have some amazing projects and continue to amaze me with creative uses of WP’s content management tools and excellent questions about usability and SEO. I’d like to share a common question about WordPress.

I installed WordPress on my domain and added a template that gives my site the look and feel of a business, but my home page is still my most recent blog posts. How do I create a real home page?

It’s a common question when you start using WordPress as a full-out CMS instead of blogging software (or in conjunction with a blog). Although it’s been answered elsewhere, I’ll also cover it here.

Note: Some themes automatically shift your most recent blog posts to another page without taking the steps below, so you might want to check if your theme supports this option before you start working.

If your theme is a standard theme that defaults to recent posts, here’s how to create a static page for your home page. We’re using Mystique for this example.

Log into your WordPress dashboard. Under your Pages menu, click to add a new page. The WordPress editor opens.

We’ll create the home page first. Add a title and any content that you’d like to appear on the new, static home page.

When you’re finished, click publish. Of course, you can always make changes later.

Next up, let’s create a page to hold all of our blog posts.

Under your Pages menu, click to add a new page. The WordPress editor opens.

Add a title for your blog page – “blog” is a good choice, but you might also consider “recent news” or “latest updates” depending on how your target market feels about the credibility of the dreaded B-word.

Unless you want content to appear at the top of the blog page above the posts, you’ll want to leave this section of the site empty.When you’re finished, click publish.

Now let’s tell WordPress which page goes where.

Under Settings, click Reading to display the Reading Settings for your WordPress site. The default setting is that the front page displays your latest posts. Instead, let’s click the radio button for a static page. We’ll set our front page to Home and our posts page to Blog (or whatever name we chose).

You can also change the number of posts the posts page will display (the default is 10) and the number of posts that will appear when folks subscribe to your RSS feed (again, the default is 10). You can show your RSS readers the full text of each blog post or a summary – there are pros and cons to both options, but we’ll save that for another blog post.

You can also change the encoding of your blog pages and feeds. Unless you know that you need to change it, you’re best leaving it set to UTF 8.

After saving our settings, let’s go to our site and see what we have.

And now, let’s see what we get when we click on the Blog page.

Looks like we’re all set!

But, what if your theme has a link to Home hard-coded into the header? When you add a Home page, you might end up with two home links in the header. If we apply the Jarrah theme, we end up with two home page links.

Although there are a number of different ways to fix this, learning how to exclude pages from your navigation is a handy trick, and we’ll use it here.

In your Dashboard, click under Appearance > Editor. Click on the right-hand side to edit the header.php file.

Although every template is a little different, we’re looking for the part of the code where our theme creates our top navigation. Where our code says

wp_list_pages(‘title_li=&depth=2&sort_column=menu_order’);

we want to change it to

wp_list_pages(‘title_li=&exclude=’);

where we’ll add the page numbers that we want to exclude from our navigation. In this case, our home page is 2, so our code will read

<?php wp_list_pages(‘title_li=&exclude=2′); ?>

We’ll save our changes and refresh our home page to see the change.

To determine what the page number of any given WordPress page (or post), you can mouse over the page link in the page editor. From the Dashboard, select Pages > Edit. When your list of pages loads, mouse over the page title link and the page number will appear in the bottom left of the browser window.

Of course, if you’re not using SEO-friendly permalinks, you can just navigate to the offending page on your WordPress site, but you really should be using SEO-friendly links! That’s another post for another time.

Related posts:

1. Tips for successful Facebook fan page after Involver
2. Five tips for a successful Facebook fan page
3. How do I delete our Facebook fan page creator?

I’m using Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook (fan page, group and my personal account) to promote our site and the content we post on our blog. We also use YouTube for video. When I post a new video to YouTube, should I share that video on the blog too? Should I post the link in Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn? We have a lot of overlap on the social networks and I’m afraid people will get sick of seeing the same content in three places.

Thanks for your excellent question! In short, my answer would be yes. But, we need to take a look at how content gets shared to understand the reasons why.

Let’s say you’re in charge of marketing, including social media, at a software company. You’ve decided to give it a shot and created a company blog. You blog regularly and get some good traffic, but you’re always looking to get more impact for the time you spend creating content. To gain a bit of exposure, you start sharing your content on three networks – Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. When you’ve got other content, you post it to a media-based site like YouTube, Flickr or SlideShare. So far, things are going well and you’re getting some success at engaging users, having posts go viral and converting a fair share of your new traffic into sales. In short, your social media is a success.

But you have this nagging worry that some of your geekier clients – stalkers, if you will – are getting the same barrage of content on multiple sites. You’re worried they’re going to get sick of you and stop sharing – or worse, stop using your software.

Not to worry – it’s not likely. While a user might connect to you on any multitude of formats (RSS from your blog, Twitter and Facebook, a fan of your YouTube channel), it’s unlikely they’re paying attention to you in each venue. Even though many of your users might be using all of the same social networks, they aren’t using all of them the same way.

Think about how you share content. When you see something you’re eager to share, do you run to Facebook or Twitter? Do you “favorite” things on YouTube and SlideShare or do you email the link to your friends (or share the link in another network entirely)? Are you active in social bookmarking sites like Digg and Delicious? No matter your answer, the point is this: you probably aren’t doing every one of them for every story that catches your eye.

Now let’s get back to your users. Even when the same story hits RSS, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, your users are going to share and spread it a little differently depending on their particular way of sharing content. By leaving out one network, you take a chance that someone who prefers to share in Twitter is going to copy and paste your link from Facebook, if that’s their preference for sharing. While it may not sound like much, it’s added work for a user – and a chance you may not want to take.

There’s another factor when it comes to sharing the same content – something akin to six degrees of separation. Although you might be connecting directly with the same people in Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, the people that they’re connecting with might be different. With the goal being that your network shares your content, the potential market you reach once you get a few steps removed from your original post might be dramatically different from network to network. Let’s look at a diagram to illustrate our point.

How networks share content

To be sure, there’s going to be some degree of overlap in each level of connections – this is especially true if you’re target market is B2B. That said, by the time my contacts have shared my content with their contacts, I’ve already reached a huge market I couldn’t touch directly. In this way, even a small but dedicated following within a social network can have a huge impact and reach well beyond their limited numbers with a valuable message.

Related posts:

1. Ask P3: Should I cross post content from my Facebook fan page to my friends?
2. Ask P3: How do I give credit for links I share?

We’ve got a couple of questions to answer today – you can submit your questions at kelli@pixelpointpress.com.

Our first question comes for a recent class participant:

A link to an interesting article was posted in a group that I’m a part of. The group is moderated, which means that you need to be approved in order to see the posts. I’d like to share the link, but linking directly to the Yahoo! group will prevent most of my readers from seeing the article. Can I post the link to the actual article? If so, how should I give credit to the person who shared the link?

Let’s talk about how to credit links in various social media outlets:

• From a private group: You need to share the link to the original article, as most readers might not be part of the group. In this case, you can cover your bases by crediting the original poster in the group (helpful if you know a real name) and perhaps mention the group you found it in (readers who link the link might consider joining the group).
• From Twitter: If you’re the first retweet, it’s easy – RT @originalposter and the link. Things get a little more complicated as a tweet gets retweeted multiple times – you’re going to run out of space pretty quickly. A wide variety of techniques exist, from saving the original poster or the final poster that you’re retweeting, saving the last tweeter and using via for the original one, but one this is for sure – try and give credit. You don’t want to be perceived as a Retweet Thief.
• From Facebook: By typing in the @ symbol in Facebook, you’ll be able to tag your friends and credit them for sharing content.
• Cross-network: If you’re moving a link between networks, you can still credit the original poster using the same techniques above.

No matter the network, just ensure that you give credit where credit is due.

Add to Favorites link

P3's Favorite Pages

Our next question comes from a fan of our Pixel/Point Press page:

Can one fan page become a fan of another fan page in Facebook?

Yes, but under a different name. While people become fans, fan pages become favorites. To select another page as a favorite of your page, visit the fan page and click the Add to Favorites link. When your page adds favorites, the other pages will be displayed on the bottom left of the page in their own popout box. For example, Pixel/Point Press is a fan of French Creek Press, our parent company.

Our final question comes from a VP of marketing who finds herself at the helm of her company’s social media campaign:

Our company has decided to pursue marketing using a Facebook fan page, among other tools. I have been asked to moderate and evaluate the interactions in our page as well as possibly place some advertising. I don’t have a Facebook account – and I don’t want one. I also don’t want to be associated personally with our company’s brand online. Is there a way to administer these accounts without having a Facebook account?

Many people don’t know that Facebook actually offers two types of accounts for individuals: Personal and Business.

Facebook Business Services

You can’t get out of having a Facebook account altogether, but you can have a business account instead of a regular, fully featured Facebook account. If you’ve never had a Facebook account, you can create a Business Account that allows you to administer all your company needs – fan pages, advertising, and other interactions with the Facebook platform, like Facebook Connect – without having a personal profile.

A couple of caveats though: If you convert your business account to a regular account, you can’t go back. And if you already have a regular account, you can’t create a business account. As always, having more than one Facebook account violates Facebook’s Terms of Use.

Related posts:

1. Ask P3: Should I share the same content on multiple networks?
2. Ask P3: Should I cross post content from my Facebook fan page to my friends?

Today’s question comes from one of our recent class participants:

I’ve built my Facebook page and I’m posting content to it from my site. My page is new, so I only have a few fans right now. But I have many friends in my regular Facebook profile. Should I post the content to my personal profile too, since more people will see it there?

That’s a great question. For example, our P3 fan page has about 100 fans, but I’ve got more than 500 friends in Facebook. Don’t I want to take advantage of that network? Or am I going to annoy the daylights out of the people who are socially connected to me but couldn’t care less about my work and self-promotion?

The answer is that it depends. Evaluate your connections on Facebook – and on every network you use – and determine whether or not they are likely to help you distribute your content. In most cases, it isn’t the size of your network that makes a difference – it’s the quality of interaction you can expect from those you connect with. If there’s a reasonable expectation that your friends would enjoy and share your content with others that might subscribe or become an active fan, tread gently and ask for their patience and help as your build your online presence.

For another look at how little the size of your network matters, don’t miss Debra Askanase’s post: The Case of the 4,000 Twitter Followers Who Don’t Care.

Related posts:

1. Ask P3: Should I share the same content on multiple networks?
2. Ask P3: How do I give credit for links I share?
3. How do I delete our Facebook fan page creator?