This week, Facebook opened up timeline for pages. Now your brand pages can have the same fly new look as your profile, which we showed you how to get back in December.
The concept is similar – same two column “timeline” look and feel. Same feature banner image up top. There are a few additional features for fan pages that will both excite and upset you though.
Let’s start with the bad news:
No custom landing page
With the new format, you can no longer assign a page besides the wall for first time guests to arrive on. 🙁
What about the rest of the tabs?
They are now cute little boxes sitting below that main banner image. If you have third party customized pages (like my Sprout Social Pages), they will be gone. If you want to switch the positions of any of the boxes, click the drop down to the right so that you can see all, and then each individual box has it’s own drop down options to switch places with any other box.
And now for some good news:
YOU CAN NOW PRIVATE MESSAGE PAGES!
This is seriously awesome and definitely going to change the scope of brand interaction on Facebook. I’m excited to see how this goes.
Handy dandy admin panel
You’ll notice at the very top of pages you’re an admin of, there’s a dashboard snapshot of notifications, new likes, messages, insights and page tips.
Better insights (for real this time)
Facebook frequently announces “improved insights and analytics” but they did it for real this time. Insights are much more understandable. The option to export to PDF is still on my wish list though.
Ability to “pin” content to the top of the page
If there’s a post you want featured at the top but it isn’t the most recent post, you can now “pin” it to the top of the page.
The ugly:
If you’re a social media manager, you know this means you’ll be getting calls from clients angry about the changes. The fact is, everyone will be switched over to this format as of March 30th, so you may as well dive in. Facebook is constantly changing and that’s something brands and marketers should get used to. It DOES suck that a lot of brands have already paid a lot of money for custom landing pages that are pretty worthless now, though.