Facebook launches new brand pages

Today, at the first Facebook Marketing Talks Live event, Facebook introduced new products and showed case studies from businesses who are finding success through marketing on Facebook.

Facebook’s Product Designer, Blaise DiPersia, and Product Manager, Jeff Kanter, spoke about the philosophy behind the new design of Facebook pages and how you can use your page to the fullest.


Pages are going to be your mission control on Facebook. The Facebook team say they believe in simplicity. As DiPersia put it, “to design an interface is like creating a piece of glass.” They want no clutter and want content to come to the service.

So here are some of the features…

Cover:

Your Facebook page should handle everything a basic website can do. The cover photo is your visual status change now and will set the tone of your page. Your profile picture, on the other hand, should be able to scale down to 30 px by 30 px so it’s good to keep your logo the same as it brings your voice. Verizon is using images taken by customer’s phones and making them into their cover.

In the bottom left, you can put 2 lines as your “elevator pitch” so it will be more prominent. You can then have a suite of Facebook apps or you can have your own. These apps will be replacing tabs (which will definitely upset a few brand reps).

It’s going to be interesting to see what brands do with these new features over the next month and beyond.

Timeline:
You can now go to any story and click on it to allow it to show on the timeline and starred content will cover the two columns which is perfect for rich media. You can also historically post data so you can create your company’s story from when it was first created (which, for a lot of companies, spans beyond the life of Facebook itself).

Pinned post:

You can pick a post to go above the fold outside of the timeline so it doesn’t get lost. This is great for the Questions app so you can have that front and centre. Another new type of post that can benefit from being pinned is called “offer” - and I’m sure you know what that entails. Basically ads are now going to leak into our feeds or at least I think that’s what’s going to happen.

Highlights:
Facebook pulled a sub tab highlighting friend activity into an app so you can see how your friends are interacting with that particular business. Facebook are also looking at how to optimise the music you are listening to through open graph. For instance, on Alicia Keys page you can see the top songs of hers your friends are listening to. Music is the first one they are trying but I’m sure it will quickly expand to other things.

Admin Panel:

The admin panel pulls out a number of things: the new notifications, the last 500 posts, new likes so you know who is connecting to your page, insights so you can have a quick overview, page tips and then a new message feature. This feature is great for customer service and I wish I had it when I was managing social media accounts. There is also a need for different admin permissions and Facebook have five types that they are looking to have out by the end of March.

For all those managing brand pages, remember that all pages will be automatically upgraded on March 30th. You have four weeks to explore how you want to use your new page before they do it for you.