Tonight I’ve seen a prompt on my facebook pages to try out the new page format. This brings the pages into line with the recent changes to the personal profile pages in terms of layout and visual design. Facebook gives more about their reasoning behind this in their blog post here.
From a marketing point of view there are some useful new features.
1) Posting elsewhere on facebook as your page – this makes it easier to engage with other relevant pages and individuals as a brand. Previously it was a little clunky as you had to post as yourself and tag your page.
2) Page notifications – For business owners who aren’t on facebook several times a day, this function allows page admins to be emailed when comments are posted on the page wall. If you have a very active page this would quickly become annoying but for the small business owner, a very useful feature.
3) Photos – A selection of photos appear across the top of the page in the new strip viewer. Carefully tagged photos with URLs to related content have always been good for sending traffic and now they are more prominent this can only increase the effect. The photos highlighted can be selected and fan photos don’t appear here.
On the downside, what were individual tabs are now replaced by a list of sub-pages, under the profile picture and are not as prominent, which may reduce traffic to custom FBML tabs.
The bio information that was under the profile picture has also been moved, strengthening the need for turning your profile picture into a billboard for your brand.