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Facebook have announced the switchover to a new appearance for company/business pages today – you can access the new layout and functionality in preview now, with full switchover happening on 10 March.
It’s certainly a welcome change, offering additional functionality that advertisers and companies have been screaming out for:
New layout
Facebook pages have now followed the revised layout of personal pages, with images featured at the top and navigation now moving to the left-hand side below the profile image. This does introduce a potential problem to companies and advertisers, as previously featured ‘tabs’ and now relegated to very low prominence in the new position. This certainly highlights the importance of setting the landing page of your Facebook company page for new visitors, and we’re sure to come up with some workarounds as we get more comfortable with the new pages.
Become a Facebook page
The big change is the ability to ‘become’ a company page – you can have ‘likes’, favourites, and post on other people’s pages!
Post as a company page
The ability to post as a company outside of the company page really opens the opportunity for brands and companies to communicate socially with people on Facebook; you’re no longer ‘locked’ within the confines of company page. Companies finally have the freedom to use Facebook to its fullest.
Like other companies
You can also build relationships with other brands and businesses by ‘liking’ as your company. Again, this functionality was previously limited to personal profiles, but businesses can now work together socially through Facebook. Another great opportunity!
Keep informed
As a consequence of the above change Facebook can now keep you better informed of all the activity around your page and your company, using the standard Facebook navigation such as ‘home’, ‘notifications’ and ‘friends’ to show you a timeline of your liked pages’ activity, updates of interaction with your company page, and recent ‘likes’.
1. Likes
You can now quickly see ‘likes’ of your company page and be notified of new likes as they happen.
2. Notifications
Keep up to date with posts, comments or interactions with your page.
3. Search
Find other pages to interact with as your company.
4. Home timeline
See the Facebook news feed for the companies and pages your company ‘likes’.
5. Switch
Quickly and easily move between your personal profile and your business pages to manage your entire Facebook presence.
So, how will you be using the new functionality and features? What do you think are the main benefits of the changes and the big drawbacks? We’re looking forward to some good discussion!
Tags: Attacat, Attacat Joel, Facebook, Social Media, Social Network, Top Rated
My immediate reaction to this is that this is really stealing LinkedIn’s greatest opportunity as it will break down the widely held assumption that Facebook is for personal and LinkedIn is for business. Facebook’s software is far superior to LinkedIn and these developments go a long way towards allowing businesses to fully engage on Facebook.nnI even see the potential for it to give Twitter a big headache. Twitter owes a lot of its success to businesses embracing it (sorry no stats on that – just a perception). These changes could pull that use more towards Facebook which in my opinion is more accessible to the masses than Twitter is.
I do largely agree, LinkedIn only seems to have the edge in personal business networking; for everything else including company-to-company networking it could now be getting left behind.nnFacebook world domination getting closer?
I think personal business networking is going to be hit too. (Have experiment to discuss in pub at lunchtime
Great improvement – although I don’t see functionality for you to log in as a business yet which would be good. I’ve not looked at it in depth yet so could be mistaken, but looks like you still need a personal Facebook account to be able to “Use Facebook as Page” – perhaps there are good reasons behind this, but as one of our team doesn’t have a Facebook account it means they still can’t use it.nnHowever, on the whole – a very welcome improvement!
Hi Joel, great post. I like the new features, especially the ability to ‘use facebook as page’.nnI don’t like the fact that posts on my page no longer appear on chronological order with most recent at the top. Do you know how I can set up so that posts appear chronologically as they used to?nThanks
Hi Fergus, I believe everyone should be able to see the option to be a page now – you should hopefully have received a Facebook email to the address that is an administrator of the page.
Yes, they certainly still want you to have a personal account associated as before. There must be some reason for this ongoing preference on their part (I haven’t totally worked it out yet) however you can still create ‘dummy’ personal profiles if you’re stuck – although remember this is against their user terms.
Hi Stephanie,
It is odd that they don’t display in date order, however from my knowledge this is only when you are viewing the page when ‘logged in as the page’ – users still seem to see it in chronological order so I don’t think it should be too much of a concern.
I would not be so fast with eliminating LinkedIN. Every company should severely bear in mind the demographics of FB and their target market behaviour patterns. I don’t have precise stats on me but from what I could google, FB is still pretty young oriented with vast majority being younger than 34 (source: http://www.checkfacebook.com/), so all high involvement and luxury good providers would not benefit a lot (earning & spending peak age is between 35-45). For quite the same reason can’t really see a lot of B2B companies finding their potential prospects through FB as well (The most active users are going to be unemployed housewives).nFinally, the quite obvious insight I found in the research is that biggest reason people spend time on the FB is communicating with friends and killing time by staring at somebody’s holiday pictures. Non of the survey participants have ever mentioned engaging with beloved brand or keeping up to date with favourite companies. (source:http://ionio.academia.edu/mgiannakos/Papers/396737/In_the_Face_book_of_the_Daily_Routine)
It would be interesting to find out what proportion of LinkedIn/Twitter users are on Facebook – I suspect a good number.nnJust because today’s use is “communicating with friends and killing time by staring at somebody’s holiday pictures” does not mean that it will be tomorrow.
There is a huge difference between being on FB and using it regularly, still majority of people use it as a contact list and go to FB when they need to contact somebody. In comparison to twitter and even LinkedIn (groups) where you would usually monitor what is going on on a much more regular basis.nnRegarding the tomorrow:nSocial Media is one of the most dynamic MC channels in existence so any strategic planning even for next 6 months is a waste of time.