Whenever I go to my Facebook Business Page, I feel like I’m on a treasure hunt looking for new feature gems that suddenly appear. Recently I noticed the new per post insights information on my Page and another time I looked at my fans and noticed a “remove admin” box appear quietly next to my name. So I decided to assemble a list of significant changes that have been made over the last six months that affect Facebook Pages and came up with the following eight:
- Remove the Creator Admin- Until the addition of this feature, not being able to remove the originating administrator when the person who created the page left the company was one of the largest complaints voiced by businesses. This lead to people playing games with business accounts and fake profiles that were used primarily to create the page in a more generic way. With the addition of this feature, businesses now can maintain control of their page. There are, however, two potential dangers to this feature:
- People have mistakenly removed themselves as an admin of the page and had no other admin to take over;
- Malicious administrators can remove all other admins and take over the page
The addition of this new feature does solve a lot of the issues experienced by businesses, however just remember to always have more than one admin on your page and pick your admins wisely.
- View Insights Per Post on Small Pages – Being able to see how many impressions per post on your Business Page wall will help small business owners determine what content is valuable to their community and what isn’t as interesting. As an admin, you will see this information just below the post. The number of impressions is how many times a post is viewed, anywhere on Facebook, not how many people have viewed the post.
- Reduced the Size for Landing Tabs – Facebook reduced the size of the tabs from 760 pixels to 520 to provide a more consistent view across all tabs. This required the redesign of custom landing tabs to ensure they weren’t cut off on the right and coincided with the addition of the standard profile image across all tabs.
- Removed Boxes / Boxes Tab – Facebook made changes to the layout of Pages and Profiles to streamline the look for its users and to make more room for advertisers by removing the boxes from the sidebar and the boxes tab in general. Many Page admins used the boxes as ways to provide base information to their community or sign-up forms for their mailing list and now need to do so in other ways.
- Added a Spam Filter on the Page Wall Tab – Facebook added a spam filter for pages that enable visitors to post updates. This is a welcome addition if it helps reduce the amount of spam being posted to Brand Pages, as it is annoying to go to your page and see someone advertising something inappropriate. Comments and interactions are always welcome when within the context of the page, but people who like your page only to put their advertisement there are unwelcome.
- Allowed Page Name Changes for Pages with Under 100 Fans – Although many Business Page owners would like to rethink their page name, being able to rename the page is a welcome change for small business owners that make the attempt but don’t quite name the page in the most beneficial way. This will give those of us who work with small businesses a chance to affect change before they grow their fan base to help them get better visibility.
- Claim Community Pages – Being able to claim a community page is a significant feature for many brands. When Facebook introduced Community Pages, pages were created for everything you listed in your profile, creating many empty community pages. By being able to claim these pages, brands can have better control of their content. After a verification process, Facebook reviews the request to merge two similar pages. Although the process hasn’t worked for me yet (I keep getting an error message when I complete the verification), I expect this will work for everyone soon.
- Claim Facebook Place Pages – If your business has a store front, chances are you have a Facebook Place page created for your business. Facebook used Localeze to populate Places with owner verified listings. If you already have a Facebook Business page, you will be encouraged to claim the Place page and merge it with your Business Page. Right now, you should only merge a Page with a Place if you have one, physical location and one Facebook Page. However, if you are doing any customization on your fan page, like custom landing tabs, don’t merge the two right now. The merged page no longer has a way of setting the default landing tab.
Facebook continues to advance their platform, providing more features that help small businesses better market their products and services. What new Page features have they added that I missed?
Update: when you merge your Business Page with your Places Page, you also lose the per post insights.
Another update: When you create a page, they are visible automatically, no longer requiring you to publish the page. However, they have now added the ability to make the page visible to admins only. You need to edit the page, go to manage permissions and check the box for visibility.
