Facebook is changing up fan pages (again…again). As a brand admin this can be a daunting time. And you might be thinking to yourself, “NOOOOOOOOooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.” Fret not, dear friend. We’ll get used to this update, just as we have we all the udpates before it. Remember when your tabs got narrower? And your logos got bigger? and your Boxes got the boot? We’ve stayed strong, resilient, and have even grown stronger.
I will say this update seems pretty significant, not only on the superficial front, but also in the back end functionality. I’ll be interested to see how/if there are any pitfalls.
Here are the main changes:
- Photos featured as they are on personal pages. So your latest pics appear above your wall. This is a painless update.
- Page navigation located on left hand sidebar. Again, this is something that already happens on personal pages, so your fans should be used to the behavior. Semi-painless.
- Show popular posts from fans, in addition to page posts. This means that your page will surface the more active posts from fans, and feature them alongside your page updates. This is a chance that you can choose to use or not. If you’re like me and manage pages that only feature official updates on the top level, it may be an easy way to begin featuring fan posts, avoiding the more spam-like content. Potentially painful change, but also potentially very pleasing.
- Interact as a page, outside of your page. Ok, this is one that I’m scared and excited for. Have you ever wanted to leave a comment on a parnter’s page, as an official representative of your company. Yeah, me too. It’s a great way to begin interacting with the community in an official capacity. I can also see this backfiring in the same way we all did when Twitter first started becoming popular. Who didn’t post something you meant to publish on your personal account, accidentally as a company once or twice? oh, um, me neither. Kinda painful.
- Updated notification preferences. This is supposed to let you choose how you interact on your page as well as your email preferences. So if you want to emerge as an individual community manager – give transparency to folks as to who is responding to their questions, you can do that now as an admin. Could be great for community managers. Painless.
If you’ve seen other stories detailing the updates go ahead and drop them into the comments below. I’m always happy to hear from other page admins who have tips and tricks to make engaging with our communities via FB more effective.
Shanee Ben-Zur 