A few months ago, Facebook made changes to the way that personal profiles were displayed on their site. They’ve now announced a similar update for business pages, used by thousands of businesses across the UK.
At the moment, you can volunteer for the upgrade but on March 10th, it will be permanently rolled out to all business pages.
It’s probably best if you wait a few days to a week before upgrading your Facebook page if you have one as there are some bugs that affect applications you may have added. However, I’ve already upgraded one of the pages I maintain so you can go and take a look and see the new design in action.
In the meantime, here’s a breakdown on the things that have changed.
1. There’s a new photo gallery at the top of business pages. In the same way that they have changed personal profiles, pages now have a gallery of photos running horizontally across the top of the page.
The most recent photos that you post to your Wall or any photos that are tagged in your page will appear in this gallery. Photos posted by your fans are not included. When you administer your page, you can choose to hide photos.
2. Navigation and menu links are now on the left-hand side where, according to Facebook, people “expect” to find them.
3. Information box has been relocated. Previously you could include some brief information about your business page and this appeared directly below your page profile picture. This is now in the Info tab.
4. Page profile pictures are smaller. At the moment you can upload a picture for your page which is 200 x 600 pixels in size. When the new designs roll out, you will only be able to upload pictures that are 180 x 540 pixels.
5. Page categories can now be changed. In the past when you set up your Facebook page, you could choose the category your page fell into during setup. However, once you’d selected your category, you couldn’t change it. When the new design rolls out however, you will be able to edit the category and sub-category in your page settings.
6. Show top posts on your wall. You will now have two Wall filters. You can choose to show posts by your page and top posts from Everyone. This gives people visiting your page a simple way to see the most interesting content first. When administering your page, you will also have additional filters for viewing posts on your page.
Your page fans can still only respond to the posts made by your page only, so if you set your page to only allow posts by yourself, you can now allow posts from others without cluttering up your Wall.
7. Use Facebook as your page. One completely new feature with the new design is the ability to interact with the rest of Facebook as your page! As your page, you can “Like” other pages, make comments, feature other pages on yours, see activity from other pages in your news feed, interact on their Walls and have those interactions actually come from your page instead of your personal profile.
This is going to be an incredible tool for increasing awareness of your page, your brand and your business across Facebook by tactfully interacting with other pages and Facebook users who are key influencers for your brand.
8. Feature other pages and admins on your page. You will also be able to show “Featured Likes” and “Page Owners” on the left-hand side of your page. “Featured Likes” show other pages that you have liked (as your page) and “Page Owners” lists “featured” page admins. You don’t even have to display all your page admins, just the ones you want your fans and visitors to your page to see.
9. Better two-way communications. With the new design, you will be able to set up notifications of activity on your page that you then receive as an email. This is great for staying in the loop on things like new posts made to your Wall by your fans and will help you to enhance the responsiveness that people experience when using your page.
You will also have better moderation and spam settings including specifying lists of words or terms that you want to prevent from showing up on your Wall. This will be great for moderating comments received by fans on your page.
Also, your newsfeed will now contain streaming content of activity from your page.
10. Full support for iFrames. FBML which stands for FaceBook-Markup-Language is the programming language currently used to develop applications within tabs on pages. Facebook are planning to phase out FBML moving instead to iFrames.
This means that the way developers (like us) build applications on pages will be consistent with the way they are built elsewhere in Facebook, such as on canvas pages. All the applications, campaigns and promotions that we build and currently maintain will remain compliant with these standards and will continue to operate functionally throughout.
You can read more about the changes to the Facebook pages on the links below. In our opinion, they will help to better integrate the experiences that people have on your page with the rest of their experiences elsewhere on Facebook.
I’ll try to keep you informed about changes and enhancements made by Facebook.
Further information
An upgrade for pages
Facebook page redesign
