Facebook Updates Your Company Page

Big changes are afoot at Facebook, which has just updated its Facebook Pages.  This is good news for small business, as they appear to be making a clearer distinction between personal profiles and company/organization pages, and making Facebook Pages easier to work with, edit, and track, all of which help to support the needs of small businesses.  Here’s a quick overview of their changes (and here’s Facebook’s overview of the changes):

• Choose your identity. Since Facebook started as a person-to-person exchange, and only later added Facebook Pages for organizations, there has often been confusion between personal and company identities.  Now they’ve made a clear distinction.  You still need a personal account to setup a company page, but you can now operate as either the personal or company identity – and you can change between them within one account (see pink arrow).  In the picture above, I have entered posts on my company page (Sound Web Solutions) as both Sound Web Solutions and as Cynthia Lavoie (see red arrows).  And when I comment on other pages, I can do so as either identity, using the “use Facebook as…” chooser (pink arrow).

NOTE: To switch between identities, you’ll need to go into your company page Settings and uncheck the box next to “Always comment and post on your page as PAGE NAME even when using Facebook as YOUR NAME”.

• Showcase photos. Photos have long been a favorite thing for Facebook users to share, but they’ve never been particularly prominent on the standard design of a company page.  Now they are (see blue arrow).  Take advantage and dress your page up with some personalized photos – of your employees, your place of business, or whatever.
• Feature other pages. If you go into the “Edit Page” mode (purple arrow), you’ll see Featured Pages which allows you set the other pages that you like. Make sure to feature your friends’ pages, business partner pages and clients.  You can also feature the human owners of other pages.
• New Left Navigation. Facebook has moved the navigation tabs from the top to the left of the page (see gold arrow).  To move the left navigation around, just click edit and then drag and drop. To add some variety and interest, you can add Notes, YouTube, Event and your blog to the default list of tabs Facebook provides.
• Interact with other pages. You can see activity from the pages you like in your News feed.  You can also highlight other Pages you are connected with as well as the people who are managing your Page.
• Get notifications when fans interact with your page or posts.

It’s exciting, to be sure, and it’s bound to make Facebook an even more popular channel for small businesses to market themselves.  However, let me add a note of warning.  As these updates show, Facebook is known to change things around often, without warning.  They also own all the content on your pages, and do not add significantly to the ranking or authority of your website.  With that said, it’s hard to ignore the fact that they have more than 500 million active users.  My suggestion: update your Facebook Page to these latest changes.  If you don’t, Facebook will authomatically update you March 1^st anyway.