Facebook business page changes

Facebook has just announced significant changes to their ‘business pages’. For those of you who are regular Facebookers, business pages will now be introducing the Timeline layouts just like the personal profiles. It will display your Facebook history in chronological order. It makes searching back through your company history much easier, but more importantly it removes the ‘Nominated Landing page’ feature that many companies have grown to love.

When is it happening?

Facebook is migrating every business page to the new design by the end of the March! That’s right, you have less than 30 days to get your Facebook info in order. Handy reference article: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/223021

The good points

The branding opportunities are awesome. You now have a large social canvas to be creative.  The header image is nice a big and the business vitals are easy to find. It’s a great opportunity to reinforce your company culture and show a human side to your business. Check out a bunch of examples here…

And here’s a sneak peak at our new page with our new brand!

The bad points

They have removed the capability to instantly serve up an enticing game or app to get new visitors to ‘LIKE’ your page. No doubt there will be more news about this in the near future as this was a fantastic feature for businesses and creative marketers. Custom pages and applications do still work, they are just positioned differently and, via a click through to a subpage, have more room to move. There is also more opportunity to promote your custom app in the image/icon gallery on your timeline homepage. It just won’t load when a user first lands on your site for the first time. A real bummer!

What to do?

1. Login to your Facebook business page as the administrator and follow the prompts to do the upgrade before the end of March 2012.
2. You will definitely need to adjust your logo shape and positioning, as Facebook will jam your existing logo into the new square box.
3. You may also need to talk to your developer and branding consultants to achieve the best outcomes with the new brandable real estate. You may also need to adjust your apps as the sizing is going to change.

Yours

The team @ KND