3 Things You Need to Know About the New Facebook Fan Pages

Facebook gives companies a few updates to their social media strategy

Late last week, Facebook rolled out a number of changes across their social network. Most importantly, they rolled out some changes to Facebook Fan Pages. If you don’t regularly check your social media communities, hopefully you already know that they changed the width to 520 pixels from 760 pixels back in August. This caused companies to resize all of their graphics and HTML.

Now there’s a new set of tricks to pay attention to, and here are the highlights.

Pages start to act a little more like profiles

You’ll now get similar features to profile pages. According to the Facebook blog:

“Many people have asked for better ways to keep up with activity on their Page. We are introducing a set of features to help manage your Page communication. Starting today, you can navigate and interact with other areas of Facebook as your Page. This means you can choose to receive notifications about fan activity, Like and comment on other Pages as your Page, and get your own News Feed where you can engage with the latest and most important news from other Pages you like.”

This is great because many company Fan Pages are run by employees who are uncomfortable using their own names in order to carry on social media conversations. With this switch, it allows the brand to act more like they can on Twitter, by engaging in dialog through the company account.

This way, instead of forcing people to come to you, you can now go to them through other fan pages. I’m sure we’ll all be drawing up a new set of Facebook best practices in the near future for that!

Pages start to look a little more like profiles too

Another new update is that Fan Pages now look and act a little more like Profile pages. I’ve already heard complaints from companies who think this will take away credibility and make them look more like a consumer. Nonsense.

Here’s how Facebook explains it:

“Starting today, you can feature photos of your Page’s most recent experiences at the top of your Page. You can highlight other Pages you are connected with as well as the people who are managing your Page.”

The only real difference this gives us is the ability to show off our audience and the people who work with us. These are all good things and lend to that whole online transparency we’re all striving for.

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I hadn’t found a single publisher to “accept” the upgrade. Not even The New York Times! Then I remembered our old friend Martha Stewart who’s always on top of her social media game. So here’s a sample of the new page. Not too much of a change going on. Looks like they opted out of the box that shows who manages the account, which would generally show up in the top right hand side of the page.

Oh and forget all that stuff you learned about FBML

We’ve been saying for a while that Facebook is starting to phase out Facebook FBML, but now it’s official:

“With our recent launch of Requests and the support for iframe on Pages Tabs, we are now ready to move forward with our previously announced plans to deprecate FBML and FBJS as a primary technology for building apps on Facebook. On March 11, 2011, you will no longer be able to create new FBML apps and Pages will no longer be able to add the Static FBML app. While all existing apps on Pages using FBML or the Static FBML app will continue to work, we strongly recommend that these apps transition to iframes as soon as possible.”

So the tabs you have up now will continue to work, but they’re just telling us that we should get into iFrames as soon as possible. Learn more about that.

Anything else to add? Have you upgraded? Is there anything you like/dislike about the new pages? Share it all in the comments, I’d love to discuss!