How to migrate an Open Graph Page to a Business Page?

Question

I have implemented the like button on a website. People have liked the website, and I have the option to administer that open graph object. However, on the administration page I see the following notice:

Administer Your Page

This is the administration interface for your webpage at [...]. You can see Insights and publish to the users that have liked your webpage. Only the administrators of the webpage can view this interface, other users are sent to the webpage.

This is a ghost page, because, as the notice says, only the administrator(s) can see it. I don't want the behavior of users being sent to my website. I want them to be able to stay on Facebook and see this page, just like they would see and interact with another business page.

Is there a tool or a request form to do this kind of migration (i.e. from an open graph page to a normal business page)?

I have researched for about two days for this issue, but I have not found any leads.

Answer 1

According to this help article, you can merge two facebook pages into one. But the constraint is that you can merge to a page with higher likes only, and the page with fewer likes will be removed. I am not sure if it works for ghost pages or not.

Answer 2

Shef, let me try to answer:

if you have an app myapp, that is canvas url https://apps.facebook.com/myapp
then you will have an application profile page: http://www.facebook.com/myapp [*]

So if a search your app from google or facebook, then they come to first this page,
and if they click go to app, they reach to your app.

However if you have just implemented like url: myapp.com/myitem=1
then you will have this "ghost" page. You need this ghost page, because you need somewhere to administrate your likes

So you are asking a real page instead ghost, well this is hard to implement this request by facebook guys. Because there is like link to refer some url. So there must be some pop up asking user: 'Do you want to follow link or go to business page instead'

[*] username is not available anymore for facebook apps. see How to get name of facebook application page?

Answer 3

You can use the ref parameter while specifying your like button. This ref parameter will be set by Facebook, for all url's/links that appear on Facebook, i.e wherever this like action is displayed with the link to the url liked by the user. So you know when a user visits your page through Facebook. Check the following from this link:

ref - a label for tracking referrals; must be less than 50 characters and can contain alphanumeric characters and some punctuation (currently +/=-.:_). The ref attribute causes two parameters to be added to the referrer URL when a user clicks a link from a stream story about a Like action: fb_ref - the ref parameter fb_source - the stream type ('home', 'profile', 'search', 'other') in which the click occurred and the story type ('oneline' or 'multiline'), concatenated with an underscore.

Upon calling your url you can redirect the user to the page on Facebook that you want. Business pages on Facebook have a particular url, of course, and you can easily do the redirect.

I don't think that you have an option to migrate an open graph page to a normal business page. You can however create your page, and give it the same name as your website. The draw back here would be when users like your page on Facebook, you won't be able to accumulate the likes already garnered by your website.

EDIT Take a look at the like box plugin (Facebook doc here ). It can be used to like pages that are on Facebook itself, from external websites. This way you will be able to accumulate your likes. You can also modify the plugin to look like a like button, not fully but almost. But you still end up creating a new page. And the old likes will not be available.