Yesterday an email came through from Daniel saying `The new Facebook pages are up’. He’d been
undertaking application development and watching the transformation as he worked. We’d known about the changes coming for some time and were excited to see how they’d effect Facebook Pages as well as individual profiles.
It’s really quite something to be witnessing live changes to the largest social networking platform as they happen. Throughout the afternoon Daryl had pages open such as the NY Times, CNN and Coca Cola (all test partners with Facebook for the new look). They were literally changing every 10 minutes as more of the new features were uploaded at FB HQ.
The timing couldn’t be better for us. It means we can adapt our development to suit the new look, as opposed to many businesss who’ve spent much time and money to make the most of their pages, only to find this effort has been wasted.
Key changes
- Facebook Pages will look more like a profile page.
This proves to us that FB values the importance of pages as much as we do. By making them as familiar to navigate and use as a profile page they will ultimately encourage more people to create and use pages to promote their product, service, business or themself. This will definitely appeal to the increasing older demographic of users.
- Increased news feed to promote our application
In an attempt to target the success of Twitter the status concept is now called a `stream’ that can publish real time data essentially creating an instant online community conversation. Any activity undertaken on a Facebook page that you’re a fan of will be promoted on your profile which means way more exposure of our application to an extended audience. - Better real estate to promote our application
As well as being able to promote our application in a prime position on the landing page, we will also have an entire tab for our application to run in and the space available to view it has doubled! We’ll be able to drive people to that via Facebook ads as well. - Application bookmarks are replaced with application feed filers
This could be a disadvantage until people get to used to where they can find them, and it shows that Facebook is increasing the emphasis on and incentives around sharing through applications with this update.The other disadvantage is the lack of branding and advertising space now available. We imagine after much feedback from Page users this could be changed. However better engagement with fans through the wall and real time feeds will ensure better ineraction between pages and profiles which means more opportunity to reach customers and drive them to pages and therefore our application!
More info can be found in Inside Facebook and this TechCrunch article
Facebook really is a phenomenon and one that keeps evolving contantly. For this very reason I think it will be around for a long time and embed itself in our lives so effectively, just as Google has, that we won’t know life without it.
