Facebook Fan Page Update: 5 Things To Know

Do you know what’s going on June 6th, 2014? Facebook announced that all fan pages will have a new update rolled out by Friday which completely changes the way they look. The announcements started in early march followed by continuous updates of explanations to some frequently asked questions. Change is always good, but sometimes it can have a drastic impact on our social media efforts similar to those we have seen with Edgerank. With these new changes happening in just two short days, let’s get right to the discussion of what this means for you and your business page(s).

Facebook Fan Pages Will Depend on Your Type of Business

Whether you have an online business or a brick and mortar layout, Facebook will organize your information in a way that benefits your Fan Page the most. If you have a set location for your business, your Fan Page will contain a section on the left hand side which will have a map to your business along with its information organized into a column. Such information will include the about section of your business, its hours of operation, and a phone number. Additionally, this section will hold relevant information related to likes, apps, reviews, and both photos and videos. Online businesses will have a similar organization. Keep in mind every business page may look a bit different, but a nice feature Facebook announced was the ability to reorganize these sections in the future. For now, it seems we’re stuck with whatever we get.

Page Posts Will Be Wider

In having a lot of your information placed on a left handed column, this frees up more space for your posts to be presented. With a wider post, your images will be easier to view which makes it visually pleasing to your audience. Essentially, you can expect these pages to look a bit more like a personal page in more than one way. It might be an attempt to make it easier to interact with fans, but we don’t know how well this will work until we try it out.

Likes Will No Longer Display Long Numerical Values

If you have 18,736 fans, your page will display ‘18.7K’ followers. This isn’t a big change unless that’s something that you look for constantly. There are some brands who would like to focus on this just a bit further as they perform competitive analyses but you shouldn’t be specifically impacted by this change. A neat feature is that when you go on other pages, by clicking on the number of likes you will see a graph below describing an abstract of their weekly progress. Details will show you how many people are talking about the page, new likes, and a positive or negative change in performance.

2 New Admin Features – Pages to Watch & This Week Section

With the numerical values in the likes section being gone, it appears Facebook has made this up by offering a new feature to page admins which allows them to monitor their competitor’s activities. You will see this new feature when you go to Page Insights and click on the “Overview” tab. In being able to monitor your competition’s performance, your efforts will be simplified by requiring less work on your part. The second feature allows you to track your efforts to see how you’re doing over the week in the form of snapshots. From these snapshots, you can measure ads, notifications, page likes and reach. I’m interested in seeing how these features will save additional time and resources.

Preparing For Facebook Fan Page Updates

With two days left it can seem like there’s so much to get done. Things will change and they will definitely affect your page but in order to remain competitive, start by evaluating your page to make sure the ‘like’ button will still be visible. Some have thought about adding an arrow in the cover photo to show users where to click, while others have simply redesigned their cover photo to accommodate the changes. Because several buttons are being moved, make sure you advertise the ones you rely on by posting about it. If you have a page that relies on people to interact with your app, webpage, or contest, you’ll want to let your audience know where these things have moved to ensure a smooth transition.

With changes occurring so frequently, there will probably be a split divide between businesses who enjoy the new changes and businesses who completely hate them. We at Boxless are still unsure how this change will affect our business, but we’re curious to know what you may think. Share your thoughts and leave a comment or send us a tweet at @BoxlessMedia.