Facebook announced today an update to Facebook pages. Did anyone else cringe when they saw the banner on the top of their pages?
I immediately took a tour of the changes and did some research. What I found are three things I liked and three things I disliked about the update. Let’s end on a positive note so we’ll start off with the dislikes.
Three Things to Dislike About Facebook Pages Update
- Tabs have been moved to left-hand navigation
I imagine that Facebook made this change so that pages are consistent with people’s profiles. The issue is that Profiles and Pages are not the same and shouldn’t be expected to look the same. The tabs interface made the custom tabs more prominent. - The width of the content area has been narrowed to make room for a third column (UPDATE — This was a Facebook bug and has been resolved)
- Latest Photo Bar on Wall Page
Again Facebook needs to keep in mind that Pages and Profiles are a very different breed. Some organizations have relevant photos to showcase whereas other organizations don’t. Organizations that don’t have photos to showcase should develop clever imagery that tells a message in the photo area rather than the default empty squares. Be careful though, these are going to be the five most recent photos that have been published or tagged and are going to be displayed randomly.
Three Things to Like About Facebook Pages Update
- Use Facebook as Your Page
Hands down this is the best feature of the update! Now you can interact with other areas of Facebook as a page rather than your individual user account. This feature allows your page to make comments on other pages and like other pages. Your page can now come alive and have its own voice. Pages can now be social! - Keyword Filtering
Facebook has now made it a lot easier for page admins to keep walls clean of offensive language and spam. Two options have been added for screening wall content. The first option, Moderation Blocklist, lets you choose keywords to look for to block a wall posting. The second option, Profanity Blocklist, lets you set a profanity level setting of lightly, moderately or strongly blocked. - New Settings
With the new settings as a page admin you can set defaults for your email notifications and how you post to your page. You can choose whether to post to your page by default as your page or yourself. You can also select which featured pages appear in the left column.
One thing is certain, once you upgrade your page to the new settings there is no turning back. In the long run the likes probably outweigh the dislikes. I do recommend that your organization think about how to layout your pages to get the maximum use of the new decreased page width. I would like to hear your thoughts on the new page changes. Please feel free to comment below and of course be sure and fan us on Facebook. We haven’t hit the update button quite yet.
