They had 120 Facebook pages. They didn't have a social media strategy.
Any team could open a page in an afternoon, and many did — for a launch, a local market, a campaign, a product range. What nobody had organised was how a page earns the right to exist, who keeps it alive, and when to close it.
The apparent problem
Too many pages, run at different speeds by different people. Some were active, some had been abandoned after a campaign ended, and many were redundant or isolated. Only six had more than 10,000 fans — which says nothing about whether the rest were viable, because there was no honest way to say which ones were worth the effort.
What was actually in the way
Starting a page had been made easy; deciding whether one deserved to exist had never been defined. There was no shared purpose, no named owner, no resource or budget plan, no measurement, no escalation route when a conversation turned difficult, no plan for ongoing management, and no decision about when to stop.
What we did
We wrote one practical company-wide blueprint for marketers, local organisations, business units and employees. It set a single order of decisions: listen first, define the need and objective, look at the communities that already exist, then join, adapt or modify one of them — and create something new only when nothing existing will do. Anything approved had to arrive with an owner, a budget, a content plan and a metric, pass a launch gate, then be tracked and honestly continued or stopped, with a clean exit and what was learned written down.
What this changed
Social activity became a governed lifecycle with real decisions in it, instead of a collection of pages. The review assessed around 120 pages; that number is the diagnosis, not the result. No improvement figures or page closures are claimed here, because the sources do not prove them.
“Ask why it should exist before asking who will run it.”