Early yesterday afternoon, the social mediasphere started buzzing with talk about Facebook's changes to Business Pages.
The changes are pretty exciting (despite the all-too-predictable uproar that comes with Facebook's updates, I am often a fan of the changes they make). In a nutshell, Business Pages will now look and function a lot more like personal profiles. Oh boy, that's just what we needed, more confusion about the difference between Profiles and Pages.
But, like I said, I'm excited about the changes. And here's why: there are a lot more opportunities now available to businesess. So here are my:
Top 4 New Facebook Page Features Businesses Will Love
1. Enhanced wall takes center stage.
Facebook Pages used to look like ... basically, an old version of a Facebook Profile, which was flat (everything on one page). With the new tab layout, the Wall is the first thing a Fan sees when they visit your Page, and they can then navigate to tabs with your other content (photos, discussions, etc. - customizable by Page admins).
What does this mean for businesses?
Businesses that create content on a regular basis will really benefit here. The Wall is a place that aggregates posts by the Page or about the Page. This includes any content shared by you (links, photos, videos, AND short text-only messages) and posts by your Fans, left for you. With this change, the Wall updates that you post will publish to your Fans' news feeds, and posts by your Fans will go to their friends' news feeds. The more content you create and the more you engage with your Fans, the more people you will be able to reach on a more regular basis.
2. Move to tabbed layout.
By moving from a single page layout to a tabbed layout, you might expect to get less visibility for each section of your Page (photos, discussions, etc.) but, just as with personal Profiles, you can add tabs for different applications (like discussions).
What does this mean for businesses?
Tabs will actually help users engage more with a Page. Instead of hoping users scroll down your ever-growing Page of applications, and choose to engage with you somehow, you make it easy for users to navigate to the sections of your Page that your Fans are most interested in, or that you want to highlight in the Page navigation.
3. Landing pages, landing pages and more landing pages!
With the move to tabbed layout, each tab has a unique URL to which you can send people. Also, while the Wall is the default landing page for Fans (so that they see the most recently added content), you can set the default landing page for non-Fans who visit your Page.
What does this mean for businesses?
Businesses will now be able to better promote different portions of their Page by driving ad traffic or potential new Fans to specific Page sections. Using landing pages (in the traditional sense and in this Facebook case) can improve conversion rates (to Fans, leads, etc.) dramatically for a business.
4. More graphs and numbers for the data-addicted marketer.
If you know us, you wouldn't be surprised by the geeky emails my coworkers and I send around to each other. "Facebook now allows you to track video views over time!
And export the data!" "Awesome!!" As part of the changes to Pages, Facebook will also provide lots more juicy data (via Facebook Insights). This includes a particularly juicy metric: the number of Facebook users who start and stop viewing your news feed posts.
What does this mean for businesses?
Any good marketer should be measuring their marketing efforts. Now Facebook makes this easier, letting you track video views, comments posted, news feed posts viewed, all in addition to the standard metrics of page views and unique visitors.
Want more?
Want to read more about Facebook Pages and the changes coming? Facebook put out a document about all the changes, which is great if you're new to Facebook Pages, or a veteran. Mashable also did a good write-up of the changes to Facebook Pages and their implications.
In addition to the changes to Facebook Pages, the user homepage is also getting a new design that resembles a much more Twitter-like layout, further showing Facebook's move towards even more of an emphasis on publishing content and conversations.
To see the new Facebook Business Page layout in action, check out the HubSpot Facebook Page. Let us know what more you'd like to see on the Page!
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