What a pain. You’ve gone to all this trouble to create a business page on Facebook and have it represent your business. Suddenly, Facebook updates it’s profile pages so that your key info, such as your employer, are prominent on your page. The problem is for many business owners who try to choose their current business page as their employer, it’s not an option and a blank, meaningless page is created instead.
The good news is that with a little monkeying around, this can be fixed.
The essence of fixing this is that every single page on Facebook, whether its a personal profile page or business page or photo, has a number that represents it – a unique identifier. You don’t see this number too often on the site, because words are easier for people to understand, so the site shows those instead. But, if you can dig up that number for your business page and then add that to your profile page, you can change where Facebook sends someone when they click the employer link on your profile.
Still with me? Here are the steps that I was able to use to do this:
- Make sure that you have either the Google Chrome or Firefox browser and the developers add-on for the one you choose. (Add-on for Google and for Firefox. These are all free to download.)
- Open your business page in the browser you are using. I’ll be using Firefox here.
- Move your cursor to hover over the “Edit Page” button. Leave it there. On the bottom, left corner of the page, you’ll see a URL pop up. At the end of the URL it says “id=” followed by a number. This is the number of your business page. Write it down.
- Open your profile page. Click “Edit Profile.” Choose “Education and Work” from the left menu bar. It’s time to add that number to your profile.
- Start entering the name of your business page on Facebook. Some pages will come up and if yours does, great. You’re all done. Many won’t though. For those people, just choose any page. (Don’t finish typing and Add what you’ve typed – actually choose from the dropdown list.) Literally any page will do because we’re going to replace the page that you add with the number you wrote down above and this random page will no longer show.
- Now you need to use the Forms option in your web browser. If you are using Firefox, you’ll see a menu bar up top. One option says “Forms”. Click that and choose “Display Form Details.”
If you are using Google Chrome, you’ll find a little gear-like icon in the upper right. Click that. Choose “Forms” and “Display Form Details.”
- When you click this, your page is going to look really messy with lots of weird words all over. Don’t panic. All you have to do is find one little piece of information: look for the line that says “employer_id=”. Next to it, there could be a blank or a number. This is the spot where you’ll enter the number that you wrote down in Step 3.
- And, the most important step of all – SAVE. Well, click “Add Job.” Don’t forget this or you’ll have to start over again!
Of course, I make no promises that this will actually work next time Facebook makes changes to the profile page, but at least for now, it worked for me! (Thanks to Tracey Gritz for pushing me to finally figure this out because it’s been driving me crazy for months!) If you get super stuck or have an easier idea, please let me know!