Your Business Probably Has a Facebook Page (even if you didn’t create it)

You may believe that no one at your funeral home has created a Facebook page for your business. Would you be surprised to find out you probably DO have a page on Facebook? Because you serve a lot of people at your location, odds are your funeral home has a Facebook presence even though you didn’t proactively create it. This is a concern because people can search for and find this unmanaged page, and they can pose comments, photos, reviews, and other content to this page. How does this happen, and what can you do about it?

There are several ways that others can create, either intentionally or unintentionally, a page for your business. The most common way this happens is when someone visiting your funeral home “checks in” on their smartphone. Checking in on Facebook is a very common thing for people to do. It’s a simple process in which they let their smartphone determine their location (through triangulation of cell towers or through GPS functions), then they choose from a list the known businesses at or near that location. This tells their Facebook friends where they are and/or what they are doing. The first time someone checks in at your facility, an Unofficial Page is created for your business. See the illustration below:

Notice the “Unofficial Page” tag under the grey box. You can see that two folks have rated the service at this funeral home. Thankfully their ratings are positive. I’ve seen some very harsh ratings on unattended pages, complete with Comments that are extremely unflattering. Even if the comments are neutral or positive, it’s an extreme liability if no one at your funeral home is monitoring and engaging with the Comment process. Consider this actual Comment and exchange that was left on the unattended page illustrated above:

This exchange was heartfelt and not critical, but it certainly would be good for the staff at the funeral home to know this conversation was taking place. Notice (circled in red) how many people have checked in on this unofficial page, and notice the number of Likes and Comments. Almost all the Reviews and Comments on this particular page were positive. By way of contrast and example, notice the number of negative Reviews and the negative Comment on this funeral home’s unofficial Facebook page:

What can you do about an unofficial page that has been established for your funeral home? Here are the first steps:

• Claim the unofficial page. Facebook explains how you can do this here.
• Once you claim the page you can choose to delete it, manage it, or merge it with an already existing page. Again,Facebook explains how to get started doing this here.

Simply deleting the page is only a temporary fix because, soon, someone else will probably check in at your funeral home, thereby creating another unofficial, unmanaged page. Obviously, the best option is to take over the page and manage it well. If this would be too time consuming or difficult for you to consider, you can turn to the experts at DISRUPT Media. We will manage and optimize your Facebook business page to garner the attention your funeral home deserves. We can craft a Facebook strategy tailored to your business using our exclusive four part FUNERAL Social Design Process. Our process is what enables DISRUPT Media to claim that we are the funeral profession’s only full-service social media management firm. Our clients who are a part of our FUNERAL Social Design Process are seeing an increase in post reach and engagement of over 300%. Go to http://funeralsocial.com to find out more about the services we offer.