Until recently, one could put a Like button on a web page, and if you were listed as the admin in the "fb:admins" tag on the page, and you then clicked the "Like" button yourself, an admin page would be created in your personal Facebook account where you could send updates to fans who had liked your web page. This is being phased out on November 7, by which time one needs to convert all such pages to "real" facebook pages following the procedure Facebook documents here:
developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like/migration/
Our nonprofit organization operates web pages (and Facebook pages) for just over 200 breed-specific animal rescue groups, all of which have Facebook like buttons on each web page. I've successfully migrated over about 20 of these pages using the procedure designated in the page above.
The problem I'm having is that at some point recently, Facebook stopped creating the Admin pages when a page admin likes a web page. This means, for about 80% or so of the rescue pages we have (many with 1000's of likes), I have no way to "migrate" them because there is no page to migrate.
All of these pages have identical code as the pages I was able to migrate, the only difference is I never went, and as page Admin, clicked the Like button on any of these pages, so Facebook never created any page which I can use for the migration process. (I would have done this months ago had I known Facebook was phasing out this ability, but I don't think it was ever announced.)
I don't know when Facebook discontinued creating Admin pages for web pages with Like buttons, but having discontinued it before the November 7 actual migration deadline, we have no way now to access the likes from many of our web pages to migrate them over to our actual Facebook pages.
This might be better illustrated by examples. We operate a page for Pit Bull Rescue here:
I successfully migrated the "Likes" from that page to our actual Facebook page here using the documentation on Facebook's migration page:
http://www.facebook.com/pitbull.rescueme.org
(Note the "Like" count on the Facebook on the web page is higher, because Facebook counts certain shares on a page, that don't count as actual likes on a Facebook page.)
But here's a page with the problem: australianshepherd.rescueme.org
It has 383 Likes but there is no way for me to migrate those likes over because there is no associated page in my Facebook account to migrate. I created a Facebook page to merge these likes into ( www.facebook.com/australianshepherd.rescueme.org ) but don't know how to get them there.
In the past I would have just clicked the Like button on the WEB page itself, and an Admin page would have been created. Apparently Facebook discontinued that ability at some point long before the November 7 migration deadline, so I have no idea how I can fix this.
I imagine (or hope) there is some parameter perhaps I can switch in some app settings panel to help with this, but I can't find any way to do it. Any suggestions?
I've been told I need to ask someone at Facebook to manually transfer "Likes" from such pages over to our actual Facebook pages, but have not been able to reach someone to do this. If this is the necessary step, can someone from Facebook please contact me privately, or post here how to get that type of assistance.
If this was just a few hundred likes it wouldn't be a big deal, but cumulatively I believe we have well over 100,000 fans we will lose if we can't fix this. The hundreds of volunteers running all these rescue group web pages who spent many hours each week over the past year building up our fan base, aren't going to be pleased about learning all their efforts will be lost.
Any suggestions would be very, very appreciated!
Sincerely,
Jeff Gold