A Facebook Page Only One Person Can Manage

One profile holding the whole page

A Facebook page looks like the business's own account, but it has no login of its own. Every page is run through the personal profiles of the people given a role on it.

On many small business pages, only one profile holds the admin role: whoever created the page, often years ago, sometimes as a favour.

Other people may post as editors, which makes the page look well looked after. But only an admin can add or remove anyone, and there is only one.

In practice the page belongs to one person's Facebook account, and everything depends on that account staying open and reachable.

How a page gets stuck

• The admin leaves and stops answering messages.
• Facebook locks their profile after a login it does not trust.
• They forget the password to an account they barely use.
• They close their personal account altogether.
• Their profile is disabled, rightly or wrongly.

The second catches businesses where nobody left at all. Getting a locked profile back can mean identity checks that the owner of a rarely used account struggles to pass.

And an admin who closes their own account takes with them the only role able to manage the page.

Roles below admin

Facebook offers four roles below admin, and most people who help with a page need one of them rather than full control.

Editors can post, edit the page and answer messages. Moderators can reply to comments and messages. Advertisers can run ads, and analysts can only read the figures.

None of them can add people, remove them or change their roles. That power belongs to admins alone, and every admin can remove the others, the creator included.

Why a busy editor hides the problem

A page with one admin and an active editor looks healthy. Posts go up, messages get answered, and nobody opens the settings.

The gap only shows when someone needs to be added or removed: a new hire, a departure, an agency starting work. By then, the one person who can do it may be out of reach.

Two admins from inside the business

The fix is a second admin, from inside the business, before anything goes wrong.

Usually that means the owner and a manager, or two owners. Each uses their own personal profile; there is no shared business login to pass around, and a profile invented for the business breaks Facebook's rules.

Staff who post day to day can be editors. A marketing company doing current work can be an editor or an advertiser, with the role reviewed when the work ends.

Adding someone properly

An existing admin opens the page's settings, chooses Page Roles, types the person's name or the email address on their Facebook account, picks the role and confirms with their password.

The new person may need to accept the role before it takes effect, so check the list afterwards rather than assuming.

While you are there, read every name on it. Anyone who has left, and anyone nobody recognises, should come off.

The admins' own accounts

A page is only as safe, and as reachable, as the personal accounts of its admins.

Each admin should turn on two-factor authentication, which asks for a code from their phone on unfamiliar devices, and set up trusted contacts: friends who can help them back in if they are ever locked out.

Keep the email address and phone number on each admin's profile current. Recovery messages go there, and an old work address is no help.

A worked example

A board game store with a play area runs tournament nights and learn-to-play evenings, and its Facebook page is where regulars check what is on.

The page was created in 2011 by one of the two owners, on his own profile. He rarely used Facebook, so he made a long-serving employee an editor, and she ran the page for years.

Last spring Facebook locked his account after a login it did not recognise. The check asked him to name friends in photographs, and he could not. Since posts kept appearing, nobody worried.

In December the employee moved to another city. Nobody remaining could post, and nobody could remove her role or add her replacement, because only an admin can.

The owner went back to the locked account. After an identity check with photo ID, which took most of two weeks, he was back in.

That evening he made his co-owner an admin, gave the new manager the editor role, removed the former employee with a note of thanks, and turned on two-factor authentication.

When nobody can get in

Start with the person who holds the admin role. A polite request, even to someone who left on poor terms, is by far the fastest route.

If their profile is locked, they can usually recover it through Facebook's own checks, and then add a second admin the same day.

If they cannot be reached at all, Facebook's help centre has forms for some situations. They are slow, they depend on showing the page belongs to the business, and they do not always succeed.

A new page is the last resort. It starts without the old page's followers and reviews, and the old one stays up, unmanaged, beside it.

The counter-case

A sole proprietor has no colleague to make a second admin.

A spouse, a business partner or the company that looks after the website can hold the role instead, as long as it is someone who will still answer the phone in five years.

A page the business barely uses has less at stake, but adding a second admin still takes two minutes.

For everyone else: two admins from inside the business, lesser roles for everyone who only posts, and protected accounts behind both.

The check

1. Open the Page Roles list under settings.
2. Count the admins on it.
3. Make a second person from the business an admin.
4. Move helpers to lesser roles such as editor.
5. Take former staff off the list.
6. Protect each admin's profile with two-factor authentication.
7. Set up trusted contacts on those profiles.

Step three is the whole point. Until a second person from the business holds the admin role, every other fix on this list depends on one account staying open.

The same single-holder risk applies to the domain name, as covered in who can own a .ca address.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.