The world of facebook continues to evolve and this time there’s imminent changes announced for brand pages. These changes are designed to mirror the new personal time layout with a less cluttered look. I’ve yet to see this transition across any of the pages in Australia yet, but from facebook media reports the changes will be rolled out from this week.
The major changes can be found in this guide and are summarised below:
- Revised two-column layout – this will be similar to the old version but the right hand column will now be the timeline with the left hand side information about the brand. This gives greater clarity to page posts and should help with engagement in a less cluttered format.
Implication – creating engaging content will become more important than ever. Make sure that you’ve filled in business milestones on the page and using good visual content to continue to draw attention. Gone are the days of posting meme’s (those funny cartoons) to drive interaction – you really need to be thinking about your content strategy.
- New metrics section – Admins will be able to monitor the activity on the far right hand side and see information about post reach, ad performance and other analytics
Implication – There’s lots of powerful information in the analytics that allow you to improve page performance. Take the time to go through this information on a regular basis and use the insights to drive activity on your page.
- Pages to watch feature – allowing you to create a list of similar competitor pages. Hopefully this will report on more than just competitor like numbers – something that Facebook uses to encourage further advertising purely on brand numbers alone and it’s not that useful without an understanding of competitor page engagement levels.
Implication – Without seeing how this functionality works it’s difficult to comment. Be aware of measuring more than fan likes, as this is a superficial metric. Facebook has a financial imperative to grow the revenue of their business and encouraging advertising is a major objective. Think strategically about how you advertise and don’t underestimate how targeted you can be to get your message to your audience.
- App thumbnails have disappeared – the ability to create custom tabs was a big feature of the old design as the thumbnail tabs were displayed under the timeline images. These apps will still be visible, but will be hidden. Keep in mind that the majority of times you’d use these apps are when you actually use the link to drive consumers to more information (or a competition hosted there etc).
Implication – Need to think about how you can still craft relevant posts and use the unique URL of any custom apps created rather than relying on consumers clicking.
- Creative requirements – It’s not anticipated that you’ll need to make creative changes. However, if your cover photo is light or if you have aligned your profile picture to align with the cover photo you will need to update the creative.
It’s reported that you’ll have two weeks to make any changes to the pages before it goes live to fans so there will be an opportunity to make any amendments before they are live.
