How to delete a Facebook business page

Facebook's global monthly users numbers some two billion strong, giving the social network vast scope to reach people virtually everywhere and massive marketing clout.

As such, many businesses will want to use Facebook to augment their marketing efforts and help manage their public and customer relations.

But over the past year or so, Facebook has found itself in hot water over privacy and data sharing issues, notably the Cambridge Analytica data sharing scandal that saw the information of millions of Facebook users harvested and used by a political strategy company in the US Presidential election of 2016.

With this in mind, some companies especially those offering online privacy products or taking a strong stance on privacy might feel the desire to distance themselves from Facebook, to the extent they remove themselves from the social network completely.

Equally, while Facebook's advertising and marketing scope can reach vast numbers of people, for some businesses it might not be generating the marketing results they wish, or it might be hampering rapid customer service relationships rather than aide them. In such cases, a company might wish to abandon Facebook in favour of channelling funds into building out its own customer-facing website for example.

The first step to doing this is to delete the company's Facebook business page, especially if it's not doing enough to benefit the enterprise in question. Read on to find out how to remove your Facebook business page.

Why you may want to delete a Facebook business page

The trick is to examine the kind of audience you want to reach, and what impact you want to have on them. For example, if you run a bakery and you want to attract local food lovers and get them to visit your store, a Facebook business page will be beneficial. However, if you're an IT provider who wants to increase your reputation among business decision-makers as an industry leader, you're likely going to be better off spending your limited time and resources on more professionally-credible platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn.

In addition to this, before businesses got savvy about the positive impact a Facebook business page could have on your organisation's marketing strategies, you may have experienced employees within your organisation setting up Facebook pages on a casual - rather than formal - basis.

This means you may have multiple pages promoting your organisation or content posted to those pages is off-brand. in other cases, the administrator who set up the page may have left and if you don't have the password, it could prove pretty difficult to transfer ownership.

Alternatively, your company may have been acquired by another and so one of the brands no longer exists, making deleting its Facebook business page a necessity.

Whatever your reason for deleting the page, you might want to consider merging pages - if there are multiple - before you completely delete it.

What's important to understand is that if you do decide to delete a Facebook page, you will lose all the content forever, as well as anyone's page likes, comments and interactions. Only follow these steps if you're certain you no longer want the page to exist.

How to delete a Facebook business page on iOS or Android

From the Facebook app, head to your list of pages and select the one you wish to delete. Tap edit page for options and then select settings. Scroll down to find the 'Remove page' section and tap the option to permanently delete the page. You'll see a warning, but click to continue if you're 100% sure you want to remove it and your page will be gone.

You do have 14 days to reverse the deletion, so if you change your mind, you can restore it.

How to delete a Facebook page from your browser

The process if you're using your browser to manage your Facebook page is equally as simple. Just head to the page you'd like to delete, head to the settings option under 'Edit page' and scroll to the bottom to 'Remove page'. Hit delete and hey presto! Your page will be removed. As is the case on mobile, you can restore your page within 14 days of deleting it, but after that, it will be gone forever.

How to delete a Facebook page if you're not an admin

Obviously, both of the options above assume you're an administrator on the page, but what happens if you're not and it was set up by an ex-employee?

This is a little trickier and is a more involved process than simply deleting the page as an admin. First, you will have to report the page to Facebook for a breach of your intellectual property. To do this, go to the page you want to delete, click the three dots below the page's cover photo and select Report page. You can explain why you want the page to be removed and it will be up to Facebook whether it removes the page or not.

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