Facebook Page Changes – Our Run Through (with images)

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As you will have read, Facebook pages have now updated with a new layout and a bunch of new features that in our opinion really represents a great shift for brand and businesses using Facebook pages as a marketing tool. Read on as we run through the changes…

Commenting, liking and notifications

This is the big one – You can now post as the page on other people’s pages and personal profiles – this needs to be used cautiously, abuse of this will be classed as spam. You can also now ‘like’ other pages – bear in mind that when you do this, the fans of your page will see this. The next one is manna from heaven – you will receive notifications (as you do on your personal accounts) when somebody interacts with the page (‘likes’ a post, makes comment etc), making management of the page far more efficient.

I have liked the Hootsuite page using The Social Penguin page:

Likes appear prominently on page

You can see the fact that we have liked the Hootsuite page – meaning users of the Social Penguin page will see the network of likes we build and easily connect to them.

We have also left a comment on the Hootsuite page from the Penguin:

Leaving a comment on a page - from a page!

This has massive potential for increasing likes on a page and attracting content interaction – again tread very carefully, don’t overdo it and always try to add value.

Photo preview pane

The photo preview panes at the top of the pages are a nice addition – please be sure to monitor the images that appear – any photos that are uploaded by you to the page can appear here (you can remove by hovering over and clicking the ‘x’). Any images uploaded by fans of the page WILL NOT appear here, which is a good thing. One issue – there does not appear to be an option to turn the photo preview pane off – meaning if you don’t have relevant or visually pleasing images within your images and decide to remove them from the pane you will see this:

Make sure you have images that will work in the preview pane!

Not a great look – make sure you have images that will work well with this feature. This could be useful for showcasing products etc but the images have to be suitable. If you visit our (admittedly under-used) page you will see how it looks when images are used that don’t really work!

Wall filters

You can now set up wall filters – this means that we can display purely messages delivered by the page but also show messages/updates from fans – in two separate feeds. This may not be necessary for lower volume pages but will become useful as page use increases.

Recommended likes

This is very cool – you will now see recommendations for pages to like based on the pages your fans like:

Nice slice of insight!

Tabs have moved

To us this is a negative, the tabs that used to appear e.g. Wall/Info/Photos/anything using FBML are now on the left hand side of the page, making them less prominent. This will become less of an issue as users become accustomed to the new layout.

Select to act as the page

Very important – you have to choose to use Facebook as the page:

Easy to choose to act as the page

The top option allows you to do this – it’s easy to switch back to your personal account:

Easy to switch back

So there we go folks, a quick run down on the key changes. All pages will automatically switch on March 10th, until then you can preview the changes or manually upgrade.   Tell us how you are getting on with the new features!

There are also some interesting thoughts from Craig McGill over on his Contently Managed blog on the need for Facebook signatures for managers now that we can post as a page.

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Related posts:

1. The Social Penguin Blog Guide To Great Facebook Pages