You may have noticed that it is harder than it used to be to get friends and friends of friends to Like that new Facebook Page you’ve created. That’s because the Suggest To Friends feature, and related page functionality, has been down for much of the time since late 2010. Facebook recently thought they fixed it, but it still hasn’t been working.

A variety of complaints have been registered – see Facebook’s discussion board at http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=10381469571&topic=21434 – including:

•    FB tells you it has sent the page requests, but it really hasn’t
•    Pages that have been suggested do not appear in the Notifications section or anywhere else on users’ FB pages
•    These page suggestions do not appear when you look for them in your mobile app
•    Once FB has mistakenly recorded your suggestion as being sent, there is no way to re-send
•    Difficulty from one browser to another (e.g. list of friends will come up on Firefox but not IE)

To make matters worse, people who do Like your page don’t have the option to suggest it to others. The best your fans can do is to “Share” it via their wall, or to share the page as a message – max of twenty people at a time.

So if you are an Administrator you can’t suggest a page and if you already Like the page you don’t have the option to suggest it.

There are several alternatives to spreading the word, such as sending direct messages, posting on your own wall, setting up events, importing contacts (which is also buggy), and posting on other people’s walls (maybe a little too direct).

Facebook supposedly has been working on the Suggest to Friends issue for months. But since these problems are still occurring with new pages and old, it seems overdue for Facebook to get it all done.

Al Kalman is Founder of MakeMyAppNOW and AlKal Media Group. Reach him at alkal@makemyappnow.com.