One of the first things we always tell folks when they're starting to establish a presence on Facebook is the importance of setting up a personal profile (Dave Kemick) before you create a business page for your company or brand (protocol 80). Even if you don't want a personal profile it's a necessity, but up until very recently the functionality of one versus the other could be quite confusing. Do I invite people to events from my personal profile or business page? Can I post as my business, or does everything have to go through my own profile? Fortunately a lot of this just got a whole lot easier with the launch of the new redesigned Facebook pages and page functionality! Let's run down the brand new goodies...
The Redesign
Essentially what this update does is bring the Facebook pages up to speed with the most recent Facebook profile update. When you first visit your business page you'll notice that it looks a lot like a standard profile. Along the top you have your latest stream of pictures, and all of the navigation links for photos and events have been moved to the left side of the page. You also have two options for how to display your wall, just like recent news on your profile page. You can either have the most popular and active updates displayed or the most recent.
Use Facebook as Your Business Page
My favorite part about the new page redesign is that you can now interact with Facebook as your page. Whenever you visit a Facebook page that you're an admin of you'll see a new option on the right side of the page called "Use Facebook as _______" where the space is the name of the page. By clicking this link you're now interacting with Facebook as though you were your business page rather than your personal profile. All of your notifications are switched over to interactions that take place on your business page, you can repost content from other pages on your own, and you can post on other people's pages as your own. When you're ready to head back to your normal profile just click the 'Account' button in the top navigation and choose your name to return to Facebook as usual.
It's important to know that when you're using Facebook as a page you're essentially in "page mode." What I mean by that is that although you can interact with other people's content, it's limited to pages. When you're using Facebook as your page, and you use the big search box at the top of the website, ONLY other pages are returned. You can only repost other page's content to your own page, and your home feed of news only includes content from the other pages you've liked (nothing from personal profiles of the people who have "liked" your page, for example). I think this is a smart choice made by Facebook to help cut back on spamming - if a business page could post directly on someone's personal profile the time it would take for businesses to start spamming the heck out of individuals would be almost zero.
Go Take the Tour!
The easiest way to learn more about the Facebook page refresh is by visiting your page on Facebook. Once it's updated to the newest page version you'll have a couple guided tours that will explain what's new in more detail. Once you've done that, come on back and let us know what your favorite new feature is! If you have any questions or are wondering how to effectively use Facebook as an inbound marketing tool, be sure to contact us and we can chat about it!
How to Audit your Online Marketing
If you are executing digital marketing, congratulations! You are most likely already one step ahead of your competition, and making strides to meaningfully connect with prospects online. But, how do you know if you’re seeing continual success year over year, and improving your metrics?
Without the tools in place to analyze and benchmark your efforts, it is impossible to scale your online marketing and ensure continuous success.
