How I regained Administrator Access of our Facebook Group
While this is not a normal SellerThink topic, its an important topic if you ever get locked out of your Facebook Group as the Administrator and your Facebook Page Master Administrator Account does not work. (This is for Facebook pages that have also been turned into Business Pages)
Facebook allows Facebook Pages to create connected groups. When a Facebook page creates a group, it becomes the senior, highest level administrator, and your personal account becomes the next level administrator below the Facebook page.
This is a great feature, in that it allows you as the Administrator of the group, to bring in other Administrators to help manage the group, in addition to having moderators with limited access.
There are several reasons why this is important. One reason is, if a mutiny occurs or one of the Administrators you have added to help you manage the group gets angry with you, even if they delete you and ban your personal Facebook account membership from the group, your Facebook Page can not be kicked out or removed from the group by other group administrators.
In this situation, you would simply switch over to the Facebook Page Administrator Member account, go into the group - ban the disruptive Admins, rejoin the group with your personal Facebook account, and then make yourself an Administrator of the group again. Essentially, it acts as a safety feature.
At the same time, this is why you only want to make people helping you manage your Facebook Page, if you choose to, an editor at the most. Editors still have access to admin most of the page, as well as post to the group under the Facebook Page name, but they do not have access to delete the Facebook page, or in this case, remove you as admin of the page, which would then removal your recovery access to your group.
However, there is a scenario which Facebook (being the vague webmasters that they are, with no direct support, and a help area full of unanswered questions or questions answered by clueless fellow Facebook users) that can lock you out of being able to regain your group access via your Facebook page administrator account.
To test a particular filtered word we wanted to use in a specific way, I as Admin, dropped my personal Facebook account down to a regular member. I wasn't concerned because as the senior admin of the groups Facebook page, I knew I could easily switch accounts and return my personal account to a group administrator, or so I thought.
We had just finished trying out the keyword and filter trigger, but it wasn't working. We determined, it was because it was this Admin who was typing the trigger word in a post that I had made as a normal member.
It was getting late, so the other Admin decided to go off to bed, while I continued trying to test the filter as a regular member. Then I figured out, it would take two members to actually make the trigger word occur, so I switched over to the Facebook page and attempted to access the groups administration area. I was alarmed when I realized it wasn't working, so in desperation, I tried to get hold of the other Admin, but they had already gone off to bed.
I literally was beginning to freak out, because there would be no Admin until 4 AM the next morning, since we live in different time zones. I couldn't understand it. The membership area of the group clearly stated that the Facebook page is and was still the Admin of the group, but for some reason it had even less access than a member account.
I did what we all do, I started out sending a message to Facebook, who sent me the automated message, "Thanks, we don't care - your own your own" type of response. So I did the next thing we all do, I went to Facebook's "Help" section and looked for an answer, and of course, I found some desperate Admins past posts, and the typical stupid answers so called, Facebook Community Leaders had responded. Almost as bad as Facebook's automated support.
I was really starting to get worried now, because I thought it might have to do with a change Facebook had made the previous week ago to groups. So, I did the next thing, which is almost always the best thing you can do - and I Google searched for the problem.
While I didn't come across any exact similar situations, since making a Facebook page an admin over a group is still somewhat new. I did find a post about Facebook pages that had been turned into business accounts being locked out of some administration areas, so I pursued that topic. I was super bummed when all of the answers I came across said that a Facebook page can not be reverted back to a personal page, after having become a business page.
But, I've never let anything like that stop me before. On a hunch, I located the Facebook Business page area. The week prior I had followed Facebook's advice and made my personal page a business page in order to gain more access to Instagram.When I had made that switch, there were no warnings or notations from Facebook suggesting that this could create issues with my attached group. In fact, Facebook's information is a single short paragraph that completely avoids describing how a Facebook page benefits from becoming a business page.
Within the business account for pages, I found the two pages that were now business pages. Perhaps it is because I had two pages connected, or maybe Facebook has changed the way business pages works, but I was able to remove the main Facebook Page that is connected to the group and revert it back to a normal page.
Thank God, it worked! I went into the group, checked to see if I had admin control in the group as the page again, and I did.
That was one frustrating experience, especially because many times, using Facebook is like trying to drive a car, before you have had any driving instructions. Then getting help when there is a problem is not available. There help section is like a bunch of elementary school kids created it and almost never has any useful answers. But what is more scary is when Facebook users like myself, blog the incorrect information.
Now you know a step, you're not going to find anywhere else. If you convert your Facebook page into a business page, you lose administration access to the group that it is the administrator of. You'll need to find the business area which is a separate website on Facebook, but can be found inside of your page settings. Go to the business area and delete the page from the business connection. If it will not let you do that, because you only have a single Facebook page, then you will need to create a second Facebook page, connect it as a business page, and then delete the page that admins your group. You'll then regain admin access level in the group and be able to restore your personal Facebook account or make any member a moderator, Admin.
I hope this helps, I wish someone had written this information out for me to have found. But I'm happy that I could write it out for you.
(Randy Dreammaker is the host of SellerThink on YouTube, main author of the SellerThink blog and manages several Facebook pages and groups.)