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3 Ways Facebook's Pending Page Changes Affect Marketers

 

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Facebook recently announced that it would be making updates to profiles and pages and that these changes would take effect on Monday, August 23. According to Facebook, these updates are designed to "simplify navigation for users, reduce complexity for developers and enable [Facebook] to build the next generation of tools for growing your business with Facebook."

While I personally think they could've been a little clearer about what these changes would do to pages, yesterday they enabled admins to see, in advance, how their pages will be altered.

Facebook's Changes Will Affect Your Pages in 3 Ways:

  1. Any "boxes" that exist in the sidebar of a page will be removed.
  2. The Boxes Tab and all of its contents will be eliminated.
  3. When you click on a tab, the page itself will become narrower (520 pixels in width).

How Marketers Should Prepare:

In the next week and a half before changes take place, I encourage marketers to take the time to make an audit of their business' Facebook page and look for the following:

1. Altered Images/Formats: If you've created any custom tabs for your Facebook page, click on these tabs to make sure the look and feel of each page hasn't been fudged. Because pages will now be narrower, there's a possibility that images/banners you've added or formats you've implemented previously will now need to be resized or reformatted.  Take a look at this example from the "Like HubSpot?" tab on HubSpot's fan page, for example:

describe the image 

2. Boxes/Boxes Tab: Currently, the preview enabled for page admins still includes the Boxes Tab, and the boxes on a page's sidebar still exist as well. I assume the purpose of this is to give admins the opportunity to take note of what will be disappearing before it actually does. If you'd like to make sure the content in these boxes still has a home on your Facebook page after the changes take place, you'll need to create new, custom Facebook tabs for this content. Therefore, marketers should take a look at the boxes on their page and in their Boxes Tab ahead of time and make decisions on what they will want to create custom tabs for when boxes are eliminated.

fb boxes tab resized 600

Yes -- I'll admit that having to make these changes is a pain. But look on the bright side: while this may be yet another thing to add to your marketing to-do list, it will give you a chance to clean up your Facebook presence and make your page even more user-friendly. The audit of your page might even reveal some outdated or unnecessary boxes, and I'm sure your fans will appreciate your more streamlined page once the changes take effect.

   

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Posted by Pamela Seiple on Thu, Aug 12, 2010 @ 03:30 PM

COMMENTS

Nice summary, Pamela.  
 
Some of our brand clients have used the "boxes" on the Wall to describe and link to their community guidelines or Rules of the Road for the Facebook Page. Since these boxes will be going away as well, we're advising: 
1) That they consider moving a link from their box to the about/description area, which *isn't* going away (thank goodness!) 
2) That they make better use of their Info tab (Note: Neither space supports FBML but full URLs DO turn into links) 
3) That they review and update custom tabs as needed, as you noted.

posted on Thursday, August 12, 2010 at 4:21 PM by Bryan Person


Thanks for nice explanation.

posted on Friday, August 13, 2010 at 3:23 AM by Vandana


Pamela-- Thanks for pulling this together-- it's very helpful. I agree it's a pain, but I hope that the "next generation of tools" from Facebook make it all worth it.

posted on Friday, August 13, 2010 at 5:57 AM by Gary Lombardo


Useful to have these top tips 10 days ahead of the deadline - cheers guys!

posted on Friday, August 13, 2010 at 6:06 AM by Hannah J


They MUST have some planned use/ulterior motive/evil plan for dominating the globe for freeing up that real estate... Any rumors?

posted on Friday, August 13, 2010 at 8:34 AM by ManPuppy Men


Great points, Bryan. Thanks for sharing your additional recommendations!

posted on Friday, August 13, 2010 at 8:51 AM by Pamela Seiple


I wonder what the real reason is for these changes. Perhaps to make more room for advertising, which has been a fast growing revenue base for Facebook?

posted on Friday, August 13, 2010 at 10:14 AM by AMGill


Super helpful. I welcome these changes for the most part, especially the removal of boxes. It was always such a clunky bugger of a tab.

posted on Friday, August 13, 2010 at 10:35 AM by Ian Greenleigh


Regarding the wall boxes: not all of them will be removed - Static FBML app boxes are still active

posted on Sunday, August 15, 2010 at 6:33 AM by Armando Alves


I like what Facebook did, plus the one page type for the photos in each album.

posted on Monday, August 16, 2010 at 2:00 AM by Virtual Agent


I think the new format of the Facebook Events pages that was rolled out a few weeks ago is a good indication of how our pages will look once these changes are implemented next week. 
 
@AMGill, I agree that I think these changes were made to increase ad space on the right side of the pages.

posted on Monday, August 16, 2010 at 12:25 PM by Joe E.


Handily enough we never used our "Boxes" tab on the Rentokil Facebook page. So that's one less thing we need to worry about changing/updating.  
I wonder how many people are still unaware of this impending change...

posted on Tuesday, August 17, 2010 at 8:54 AM by Danusia


Thanks for this info.. I am sure facebook sent it to me but I actually checked it with this post and for sure it has messed up our graphic!

posted on Wednesday, August 18, 2010 at 9:59 AM by Kim Kolb


On my page on one of my custom tabs I have one of those "Invite Your Friends" boxes. See website link. I can't control the width of it and it's being cut off when I login as admin and see the preview of the new layout. Do you think Facebook will fix that?

posted on Wednesday, August 18, 2010 at 3:44 PM by Josh


@Josh: I would assume that because it's a Facebook-generated widget, Facebook will make changes to the widgets they offer to accommodate the new page width. You may need to grab a new, updated code for it, but that's no biggie.

posted on Wednesday, August 18, 2010 at 3:50 PM by Pamela Seiple


@Pamela: I think this will make Facebook webpage more crowded and ll become less user friendly. How can you say that it will make facebook more user friendly?  
 
I think reducing the content for an organization's Facebook fan page will make it more attractive.

posted on Thursday, August 19, 2010 at 11:10 AM by Anand


My edit page, insights, suggest to friends, store description and hours are all gone as well as my fans and favorite pages. Is this all part of the new look? How do you suggest to friends etc? Is this a ploy to get us to buy advertising?

posted on Tuesday, August 24, 2010 at 10:21 PM by Debbie


Okay, now it is all back... not sure what that was all about... maybe a glitch. Hope they don't take it all back off! Thanks for all the great info :)

posted on Tuesday, August 24, 2010 at 10:56 PM by Debbie


Comments have been closed for this article.