Facebook App Profile Pages Disappear By February 1 [UPDATED]

Posted by David Cohen on January 4th, 2012 1:32 PM

Say goodbye to Facebook application profile pages, as page managers are seeing notifications stating that they will be removed by February.
Page managers are seeing the banner pictured above, with the heading, “Removing App Profile Pages,” and the notification:

By February1, 2012, we are removing app profile pages. You can migrate likes and the vanity URL of this page to an existing Facebook page with the same name and product/app category.

The social network’s move comes six months after its announcement that its app directory would be phased out, which had actually been in the works a while before the announcement.
The moves seem to be aimed at encouraging app developers to make their apps more search-friendly and at prodding users to discover them via Facebook search.
However, when searching for general terms, and not by specific app names, it often takes two to three results pages until the most used apps appear in the results. Is it too optimistic on our part to hope that the search process will improve now that it is being emphasized more?
Facebook said in a post on its Developer Blog last month that it was making the move due to inconsistencies between its app profile pages and regular pages, including different insights, application-program interfaces, and distribution channels. The blog post continued:

If you are an admin of an eligible Facebook page (must be of the product/app category and match the app name), you will be prompted with the ability to transfer likes to this Page. Transferring likes will give you the ability to publish updates to these users from your new Facebook page as you do today.

Please note that we will only transfer likes, and not the content of these pages. Before you go through the migration process, please ensure that you have downloaded all photos, posts, Insights, and any other material that you want to keep. Once you hit the migrate button, the app profile page will be deleted.

The like migration can take up to seven days, and it may be several hours before you see any movement on the page. If you have a vanity URL associated with your app profile page, we will transfer the vanity URL to the Facebook page so long as one doesn’t already exist for the page.

If no action is taken before Feb. 1, your app profile page will be deleted and we will send all app profile page traffic directly to your app.

Readers: Do you find Facebook app profile pages to be useful, or do you usually go right to the apps themselves?

Sphere: Related Content