Neworld, Great relationships build great brands

Last night Facebook made some changes to the layout of pages. From first inspection it looks like they have taken the better aspects of the leaked profile layout from last December and thrown in some new features to boot. Here’s a quick run through of all the new changes, you can preview any pages you admin from here until March 10th, when all pages will move to this new layout. You can see from the Glenisk (a Neworld client) page below what changes have been made. The pages now look a lot more like a personal profile.

1. Recent Photos

The most recent photo uploads are now displayed across the top of the page. This can really bring out the personality of the brand, adding more colour and life to a page. If there’s a photo you don’t like simply hover your mouse over it and click on the ‘x’ in the top right corner. You can un-hide these photo’s in the edit page section. The profile photo app’s that allow personal profiles to look even more stunning (see) won’t work as the images change order every time the page is refreshed. However you could get creative and use shots that say something about your brand but the order in which they appear doesn’t matter. This five picture display won’t show any photo’s uploaded by fans.

2. Wall Logo

Although you can’t see it from the example above, the Wall Logo has been reduced in dimensions from 200 X 600 to 180 X 540.

3. New Tab Menu Location

Tab’s (Wall, Info, Apps) have moved from top center location to under the wall logo. The menu now also includes an ‘Admin View’ of the wall which shows the most recent and hidden posts.

4. Use Facebook As Page

A gripe many page admins have had is having to ‘like’ posts as your personal profile and not as the page itself. In other words pages couldnt ‘like’ a comment to show appreciation for it, they would have to leave a comment to do so. If you go into ‘Use Facebook As Page’ you also get to see what pages your fans like, and how many of them like that specific page. Useful for identifying possible co-promotions perhaps?

5. Wall Filters

Fans can now view your page posts either by Everyone or just posts by the brand. If fans select to view posts by everyone what they will see is the most interesting post first. That will be posts that have gained the most interaction such as comments and likes, this will also include posts by the brand as well as posts by fans. Less interesting posts will be featured less prominently. The posts by brand filter will display only brand posts in the order they were posted. Admin’s can access a Most Recent view of posts, see point 3 above.

6. You & The Brand

This displays what other friends of yours are connected with the brand, and what liked pages the brand and you share.

7. Edit Info

Edit info located at the top is now the entry point for the old ‘edit page’. As you can see from this menu on the left nothing has really changed, save for some really good new admin features.

8. Your Settings

Now you can choose to always post as the page or post as your own profile, you can also set the get ’email notifications’ from here. While there’s been apps that have provided email notifications in the past it was always one feature I couldn’t understand why Facebook didn’t provide. Although in this iteration you can only get notifications to the email address you have signed up to Facebook with and you cannot set a time to receive notifications, they will go out as soon as posted. This means busy pages could send lots of email notifications. One way around this is to set the notifications to off and access the ‘Use Facebook As Page’ feature, this will list any notifications in the top left menu, just like on personal profiles.

9. Manage Permissions

There’s also a new feature to Manage Permissions, here you can now add keywords to a moderation list. If a fan uses such a word you can mark it as spam and decide late if it can be displayed. You can also set a profanity blocklist.

9. Featured

Also added to the new edit into menu is ‘Featured’, this allows you to feature the pages your page likes, and to display page admins. You can choose to display as many or none of the page admins as you like. This is useful for giving fans a point of contact for the brand. For page admins you may find friend requests coming in from fans, how to deal with that can be difficult. Do you ignore them or accept them? In this case it may be best to display an admin specific profile.

10. Photo’s

Brands can now tag people and the brand in photo’s uploaded to the page. Although you can only tag connections to your personal profile, yourself and the brand page. You can’t tag fans who you have no connection with.

11. New Page Layout FAQ’s

Facebook have released an FAQ guide to help admins with any upgraded pages. Once upgraded they suggest;

– Checking the profile picture as the change in size may affect it

– Check your brands ‘page category’ is now correct as this will be displayed

– Check the email notification settings as outlined in point 8 above.

– You can’t reverse the change, but all pages will be upgraded by March 10th.

– Comments grayed out on the page are marked as potential spam, they aren’t visible to fans. Comments can be unmarked as spam by hovering over the comment and clicking the icon in the top right corner.

12. The End of Static FBML

While the new page layout will come into effect for all pages on March 10th, the very next day Facebook will no longer enable Static FBML tabs to be added to pages. This means the end for Static FBML, although existing FBML tabs will be supported for the foreseeable future.  Instead Facebook will be promoting the use of iFrames within tabs to host content.

You can access the FAQ’s and report any bugs from here. With any big Facebook change there will be many bugs and it could take several days for them to be ironed out, so don’t worry if you have any issues right now. Alternatively you could wait to switch over at a later date.

Overall it’s a welcome overhaul of the page that has been much needed. There’s useful new admin tools that make it a little bit easier to use Facebook and the page looks much fresher and visually appealing. What do you think of the new look?