Making Your Fan Page Your Place of Work on Facebook

I’m involved in running a bunch of Facebook fan pages. Facebook is great, but it has some annoying little idiosyncrasies that take a bit to get used to. One thing I’ve always found annoying is the way that Facebook automatically makes pages for your place of work. It doesn’t matter that your company has a great fan page. There’s no easy way to associate that page with your profile.

There may not be an easy way to do it, there is a complicated one. In one of Social Media Examiner‘s videos, they tell you how to do it. It may be complicated, but it works (even if it only works in firefox). You can only do this if you are the administrator of the page. Here’s how it goes:

1. Install the web developer add-on for Firefox.
2. On Facebook, go to your fan page and click the [Edit Page] button on the top right (this is why you need to be an admin).
3. Your url will now include the id of your page. Copy the number after the “id=”.



4. Go to your profile and click the [Edit Profile] button.
   
5. Click on [Education and Work] in the left hand column of the page.
6. Type in the name of the company in the [Employer] box.
7. If your page employer doesn’t show up, click the [Add] link.
8. On the firefox toolbar, click the Forms menu and click [Display Form Details]. This will make the page look really nasty, but you only need to see it like that for a short while.
9. Paste the id number that you copied in step 4 into the box next to “<input name=”employer_id”>”
10. Turn off the display by clicking the Forms menu and selecting [Display Form Details] again.
11. Fill in the rest of the info in the form and click [Save changes].

That’s it. Easy, right?

If you work in a big enough company, like Coca-Cola, the fan page may show up without you needing to install anything on Firefox. You can just edit your profile when you type in the company (like in step 6) and it will automatically show up.  That didn’t work for me.

I can’t say that this is the prettiest way to update your information, but it works, so don’t knock it. Wouldn’t it be great if Facebook could figure it out for themselves?  I would have thought that Facebook would like to link to pages that have more information than those empty business pages that no one finds useful. Facebook seems to be constantly changing. I’m sure that they’ll get it together one of these days. Facebook certainly keeps us on our toes.