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As you likely know, last week Facebook implemented a series of changes to their Brand Pages. Although you can currently choose not to opt-in to the new design, all Pages will automatically be upgraded on March 10. Though you might as well start now learning about the new options and how they will affect your marketing, you might want to wait another week or so to make sure they’ve got all the bugs worked out. Plus, the applications you are using may not have been updated yet, so give the developers some time to catch up.
Here’s a rundown of the 10 biggest changes and how they affect marketers:
1) Tab applications move to sidebar. This is helpful, because now custom tab names will not be cut off after 12 characters!
2) New photo strip at top of page. The pros are, your new photos will be displayed more prominently and the Page looks more engaging. The cons is, you’d better make sure your photos are updated regularly, because that’s the first thing Fans will see.
3) Profile picture size reduced from 200 x 600 pixels to 180 x 540, presumably to accommodate the new Applications sidebar. This allows for slightly less space if you incorporate the profile image into your marketing initiatives, but will likely have little negative impact.
4) Information Box has been removed and now resides under the Info tab. You may need to update this information to ensure the About Us and Description sections are not redundant, since they now reside on the same tab.
5) Use Facebook as a Brand! Pages can now “Like” other Pages, allowing brands to behave and interact more like individuals. Before, you could only list other Pages as your “Favorites.” Now, you can actually “Like” them and leave comments from your brand on other brand pages. This is especially valuable for organizations that have multiple members or clients, as you can now “Like” you members’ Pages as your Brand, rather than as an individual. PLUS, you can now leave comments on other Pages as your Brand, which could be very helpful by allowing you to interact with other organizations’s Pages whose Fans are relevant to your brand.
6) New Featured Pages sidebar shows other Pages that you Like. See above for reasons this is helpful!
7) Editable Page Category – finally! Brands used to be locked into the category originally selected when the Page was created, which could be frustrating if you’ve taken over a Page created by someone else and disagree with the Category selection. Facebook is finally heeding the cries for more flexibility!
New Mutual Friends and Mutual Interests section helps with cross-promoting Brands to users with shared interests. This could result in greater visibility for your Brand, as it may now show up on other Brand Pages with similar Fans.
9) Enhanced communications for Admins mean you can now setup email notifications when someone posts to your Wall; new Spam filters also allow you to screen out specific phrases or words instead of just banning comments altogether.
10) Move away from FBML toward iFrame programming support! This is great for marketers, as it means fewer limitations on the type of multimedia content you can insert into your custom tabs. Facebook is started to open up its framework even more to developers, which is very good news.
