Business Pages Are More Like Personal Pages

Facebook announced major changes to business pages yesterday.  The big news is that features that have been noticeably lacking on business pages have arrived! 

1. Pages were designed for businesses to be on Facebook and engage with an audience, but the engagement tools provided to businesses didn’t quite measure up.  Now, you can choose to receive notifications about activity (comments, posts, likes, etc) on your business page just like you can on your personal page – allowing you to be more responsive to your audience when they choose to engage with your business.
2. You can now interact with other pages (not personal profiles) as your page.  On the right side of the page, there is an option that says “Use Facebook as <your page name>.”  Click on this option and then view other pages that your page has liked.  You can comment and like on those pages as your business, instead of as you personally.  This is a huge visibility builder for business pages!
3. You can now see a news feed of all of the pages your business page has liked.  Want to really keep your business and personal lives separate on Facebook?  This is a huge step forward!  Instead of using your personal profile to ‘like’ pages that are more relevant to your business, you can like those as your business page instead and then see all of those pages in their own newsfeed.
4. Business pages now have the same row of featured photos at the top that the personal pages have.  A big difference is that you can’t manipulate the order of the photos on the business page to create a cool design – we tried!  For business pages, the photos appear at random.  With some creativity, you can still use this space to display something interesting.

Visibility and Transparency

1. You can now choose to display who the page administrators are.  Previously, the administrators were always hidden.  There are pros and cons to both sides of whether to display or not, and it will depend on who your administrators are, whether you want to reveal them, and/or if you want your personal profile publicly associated with your business page.
2. You now have visibility into other pages that your fans like.  On the right side of your business page, you will see a Recommended Pages section that will show you several pages along with how many of your fans like these pages.  This feature will give you a greater insight into the likes and interests of your audience – invaluable!

Upgrading your Facebook Page

If you manage multiple pages, visit http://www.facebook.com/pages/status/ to see a list of your pages and choose which you would like to upgrade.  The new pages are in preview release now, and all pages will be automatically updated on March 10.  We strongly recommend finding some time in the next few weeks to upgrade your page and make sure that everything is in order and appearing as you expect it to appear before Facebook makes those changes for you.

If you need some help understanding the upgrade process or how to really take advantage of the new features, book your page upgrade package today.