Did you know you can't remove the creator of your Facebook page?

[Kimberly Charles]

I've been working with a department to create a new Facebook page and discovered that although you can add or remove multiple administrators, you can never remove the original creator of the Facebook page. This means that if I create a page for my university and then leave, they can never remove me from the page.

Did anyone else know about this restriction? I plan to send a suggestion to Facebook that they should change that feature and thought others may want to send the same suggestion.

[DJ Turner]

We discovered this, too, as the person who created our Facebook page left the seminary to work somewhere else. We were, however, eventually able to change the primary administrator through requests to Facebook to remove the one person and grant the "creator" status to one of our other administrators. The change had to be made by Facebook, but we were able to make the change.

[Mark Rothbaum]

I think you are able to put a request in for a specific page.

I think this is done as a little bit of a security measure. It can help prevent someone from hijacking your page (e.g., a disgruntled employee). Otherwise, you run the risk that a newly added admin could remove all the other admins and take over a page. Making the creator unremoveable prevents this type of issue. Only the creator could remove everyone else (and since the creator set up the page in the first place and, at the very least, added the first of any additional admins, this seems like less of a risk).

[Brent Schneider]

From the attached developers hand out.

Adding and Removing Administrators of Your

Facebook Page
If you have colleagues who help maintain your Facebook Page, you may want to add
them as administrators of your Page. Since you should never share your personal log-in
information to your user profile, inviting your colleague as administrators is the only
way to share control of your Facebook Page. The user(s) you add will then need to
confirm that they want to have administrative access to the Page.
-Go to your Facebook Page, and click ‘Admins’ in the upper-right part of the Page.
Then select from your friends on Facebook and/or enter the email addresses of
colleagues who aren’t yet on Facebook
-Users cannot see who is administrating your Facebook Page
-Never share your secret log-in details
To remove an admin from your Facebook Page, just click ‘Remove admin’ next to the
name of the person you want to remove on the Admins page. If you accidentally remove
yourself as an administrator of your Facebook Page, you will need to ask one of the

Facebook Pages
The Insider’s Guide 11
remaining admins to add you as an administrator of the Page. Never remove yourself as
an administrator of your Facebook Page unless there is at least one

[Nathan Ronchetti]

Noticed the April 2008 date on that document--any idea if there's an updated version floating about now that page structure has changed?

[Dan Thornbury]

I've just tested this by asking one of our admins to remove me, the creator of our College's page, which she cannot.

It's a good policy, not ideal but good - although I wish it were a little more obvious to begin with. At least I know that inviting other admins can be done safely, knowing that the creator cannot be removed and thus lowering the potential for hijacking an entire facebook page! I'm considering inviting one of the student's to be an admin and was afraid of having them delete all the staff!

I can see it may cause problems when/if i eventually leave my current position though.

[Steve Bacher]

I did notice in all the official documentation that fb emphasizes how easy it is to add and delete other admins, but avoids the question of, say, what happens if you sell your business and want to sell the fb page with it. Same problem as when an employee page creator leaves.

In a related problem, I have found that some apps can't tell the difference between my profile and my page, the result being that, for example, tweets posted from the college's twitter account to fb status appear on my personal fb status and not the page. I concluded that the best option is to have a separate fb profile using my business email address, from which I administer the college's page.

[Sherri Hansell]

Hello Steve,

I ended up creating a seperate FB account with a generic email address provided by my school that can be transferred on to someone else. However, I had to use a name to set up the FB account. I ended up using my own. I would like to use the change a name feature to change the name on the account when I leave. I would also like to hide the new account from the search engine so that people only find my personal account

-Has anyone used the change a name feature in FB?
-Has anyone completely hidden their FB acount?

This is really cumbersome. want to hear DJ on how she got Facebook to change her account.

[Sherri Hansell]

I just started a Fan Page for my school using my personal account--this turned out to be a big mistake. When I posted photos to the fan page they showed up in my account. I would like to use my school email address and recreate the fan page. Would using my school email address give me more access to the school's network in Facebook? However, I am worried that I will not be able to transfer the account.

Right now I am following a thread on Facebook regarding
Transferring a page to new ownership?
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#topic_top

Please let me know if you find a solution.

[Luis]

It appears that you can now remove any admin, even the creator, from Facebook pages. We were running into an issue with this but it seems that in the last few days this restriction disappeared and any admin could be removed.

I'm curious if some accounts saw this change previously. Strangely I'm not finding a lot of info on the release of this change.