Who said large companies/popular websites were perfect and bug-free? 🙂 Being a large company surely gives you more budget to iron all the possible glitches out but it doesn’t guarantee that they will actually be all taken care of – in many cases, it’s just the most used stuff that gets taken care of first of all and minor issues or lesser used functionality sometimes ends up being forgotten about. Now what if I told you that one of the popular features of Facebook, maybe even the one more critical for their business, was buggy? You’d think with all the talk of fake accounts impacting the effectiveness of advertising via their platform, they would be trying to go out of their way trying to attract potential advertisers (= businesses) – but businesses’ place on Facebook is a business page you as a business owner are supposed to set up for it. Yet, promoting a business page on Facebook can be trickier than one would imagine – and not because of any marketing issues but a technical glitch.
Here’s the story. We have recently launched a Facebook page for ContentMango as we are getting ready for its launch and went public with it, only for me to find that I am not able to invite any of my Facebook friends to like it!
How come, you ask? No, it’s not Facebook banning me just like Google+ did a while ago. What actually happened was this: I first created the page back in August before we were ready to show it to the public and just put it into the private mode. While doing this, of course I refused the Facebook page setup wizard’s suggestion to invite my friends to the page – and as a result, it appears that the feature was disabled for me altogether!
Typically, when you are inviting people to like your page, the button for it would be here:
In my case, I couldn’t find it anywhere. Reading Facebook help docs did not help either – the case was not described anywhere. This was a totally undocumented glitch and no preset way to resolve it. What I had to do in the end is go to my browser’s saved cookies and delete all cookies associated with Facebook – and bingo, it worked! I had to relogin as it kicked me out, but at least I had the functionality back and was able to use it now.
By the way, if you’re reading this, don’t forget to go to that page and like it and also sing up at ContentMango to be the first to know when we launch 🙂