Social Media - Facebook launches a new design for pages!

You may have already seen through various social media and online marketing sources that Facebook has now announced an upgrade available on all pages! It’s about time! The new page designs were first seen in December 2010, when Facebook accidentally launched it and quickly took it down. From today, users are able to choose whether to upgrade or not (more info can be found here: http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150090729064822&id=10381469571 ) with all pages being automatically moved to the new style starting 10th March 2011.

So what is this new design all about?

The main changes that you will experience currently are:

• Your latest photos shown at the top of your page – photostrip
-- As with the new profile designs that Facebook made available a while ago, your most recent photos will now be displayed at the top of your page. To remove a photo you simply scroll over it and click the X in the top right hand corner - This will be very interesting to see how marketers use this new feature
• Notifications when fans interact with your page or make a post
You are now able to edit a setting on your page (through the ‘Edit page’ option and then ‘Your Settings’ tab) that enables an email to be sent to you whenever there is activity on your page. If you then select the option “View all email settings for your pages.” you will then see a full list of notifications you are set to receive by email/SMS. For pages, the options are:

• Use your page to interact with and navigate other areas of Facebook
-- Page admins can now choose to use Facebook as their page allowing posts etc under the pages alias (in new right hand menu). If you choose to do this, when people like or interact with your page, you will be notified by the icons in the top left menu next to the Facebook logo. -- Interact with other pages where you can like and make comments as your own page -- See results from other pages you ‘like’ in your page news feed
• Tabs have been removed and replaced with the left hand navigation menu
-- Tab names can now be longer -- Tabs can now use iframes -- For more information, please see the Facebook developer blog: http://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/462  
• A news feed on the page
-- Ability to filter wall posts to ‘everyone’ or just by your page -- The “Everyone” filter on the Wall provides a new way for people to see the posts that Facebook considers to be the most relevant (no longer in chronological order). This means that recent posts by friends, other users in the same language or country and posts that have received a lot of comments or likes will appear at the top of the feed. -- If you select to just show your posts on your wall, these will appear in reverse chronological order.
• New Settings available

In case you don’t yet have a Facebook page etc but want to see these changes, here are some screenshots of the preview tour that Facebook is currently showing:

I believe that Facebook will also be adding more new features in the coming months to pages. All in all, this redesign is primarily taking pages and making them more interactive and similar to the new user profile designs rolled out a couple of months ago, making pages even more engaging for users.

Don’t forget to adjust your Facebook page to make the best use of these changes!

I would love to know what you have done with the new features currently available – either leave a comment below or find me on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/katebarrett


Why not check out some other articles about this switch over?

Mashable: Facebook launches pages redesign: http://mashable.com/2011/02/10/facebook-pages-redesign-2/

ALLFacebook.com: Everything you need to know about the new Facebook pages: http://www.allfacebook.com/new-facebook-pages-2-2011-02

InsideFacebook: Facebook Page Redesigns 2011: http://www.insidefacebook.com/2011/02/10/page-redesign-2011-guide/