Well, all too soon my round-up of the week is here again – and this last week is going out with a bang as I decided to merge Facebook pages from my health business that were contributing to my lack of focus. Those of my online friends who have been urging me to focus more – I HAVE been listening.
I had two pages, one for my general health blog, which makes the occasional sale, but nothing to write home about. That's the page I decided to sacrifice.
The other was for my Hair Analysis business which was more consistently successful and more of a niche, being a practitioner service. So I figure that with more focused work it could be even better. The Healthy Eating blog will remain – as it often recommends Hair Mineral Analysis – so anyone who found that information helpful before can still access it. Updates will be infrequent. (Update February 2016: I have taken down my HMA / nutrition blogs as the HMA company decided I was no longer allowed to trade world-wide. I am leaving this post here because the principle remains the same.)
For those of you who are social media wizards, you probably wonder what all the fuss is about, but I was finding it hard work to keep updating the two health pages, plus the Facebook page that relates to this blog. All three were suffering, and my stress levels were rising!
I can't honestly remember who or what inspired me to look if it was possible to merge Facebook pages, but I did – and it is. In fact the “rules” stated in the help pages are more stringent that turned out to be the case. It was said that:
This option is only available for pages that represent the same thing and have similar names. You can only merge the page with fewer likes into the one with more likes.
My Healthy Eating page had been “up” for longer than the Hair Mineral Analysis page, so the “Like” numbers were the wrong way round – Healthy Eating had MORE than Hair Mineral Analysis, which implied I should be merging the OTHER way, to conform to the rules. And although they were on similar topics (health) the names weren't similar at all.
Nevertheless, feeling “stuck” I decided to just go for it and try the merge operation. I will confess I expected the worst:
- Not permitted according to the stated rules
- Request going off into infinity for a three month wait after which request denied
- Total disaster resulting in loss of both pages!
Merge Facebook Pages – what went well?
What a cheerful soul I am 🙂 So I'm delighted to report that I was totally wrong, and later the same evening I got a message to say that my pages had been merged – and on superficial inspection it seems to have worked perfectly.
- The Likes have been added together. Some friends had liked both pages, so somewhat less when combined than when separate – to be expected.
- To be honest I can't tell whether the posts have merged successfully or not, but I was posting on the same general topic, so as long as the majority of the Mineral posts survived (which they have) it doesn't matter.
Merge Facebook Pages – what went wrong?
It would be unrealistic to expect it to be totally without challenges, and I'm still having realizations of what they are:
- The worst thing I've found so far was that I lost the history of my business that I'd added as Milestone posts on the now-defunct page which was the first one I put up. Have started adding some of that back, but not going to put as much effort into history as current updates.
- There will be broken links where I've referred to the old page, e.g. blogs and profiles. From typing the old page into my browser, Facebook doesn't re-direct to the new.
- The “Follow Me” links on various blogs/sites will need fixing. Annoyingly enough I thought that would be a five minute job, but I can't find out where I configured them in my blog. That needs a little back-tracking of Sue's course where I learned how to do it.
- Networked blogs threw a hissy fit, but was kind enough to email me so I could fix it.
Overall I'm really glad I decided to merge my Facebook pages – and that I did it, and that it worked out pretty well overall.
Thanks for help from others
Too many to mention really, I'm getting so much help all round, but here's a few special mentions. Apologies if I missed YOU this time. You are no less appreciated because of my poor memory.
Adding Cloudinary last week went fine, then I tried some further plugins to speed up my blog and nearly had a nervous breakdown when my images started disappearing. Put out an agonised shriek for help in our closed Facebook group and fortunately a couple of clever people (Janie Thomson and John Collins) realised that a plugin I'd recently installed (Lazy Loader) was causing the problem, NOT Cloudinary. Deactivated that and all was well again.
Too many people to name individually have offered help and advice on a better theme for my blogs. I'm still choosing, but thanks to everyone for suggestions.
So – that's the round-up of this week. Happy Easter to those of you reading it on the Easter weekend. And remember – chocolate contains magnesium, so I am allowed Easter eggs, and so are you!
