Many of you will have recieved an email detailing Facebook's 'New Pages Experience' or logged into Facebook recently and noticed that it has once again changed! 

When it comes to your Facebook Business page it’ll have likely changed to what is known as the ‘New Pages Experience’. This is perhaps one of Facebook's biggest changes when it comes to pages in a long time as it has slowly been rolling out the changes since the backend of last year. 

If you are confused by the changes or want to know the new features that have been introduced as part of this update - stay tuned!

New Page Experience Explained

So what exactly is the new Pages experience? Well, it's Facebook's new way of helping businesses build their brand on the social network and interact as a business with others. Don’t worry though, you won't lose any of your previous posts, followers or a blue verification tick if you have one by moving over to the new Pages experience. 

When you log in you'll need to head over to the top right corner of the page and switch from your personal profile to your business page. Once you’ve swapped into your business page, you’ll be interacting as your business which means any posts you share and any interactions you make such as likes or comments will come from your business itself - just remember to switch back to your personal page before posting anything personal to you!

Your followers won’t see a large difference so don’t panic about it impacting their experience of your page. 

New Features

There are a lot of fantastic new features that have come about as a result of this new update but perhaps one of the most simple and helpful is the new layout. It's more intuitive and less confusing to navigate settings. 

There's also the addition of a Home feed for your business page, which is something never seen before when it comes to Facebook pages. You'll now have a curated news feed just for your business page, made up of posts from pages, influential figures, groups and other businesses you follow. 

This means you can more easily see what other businesses are up to on their socials but also interact within the news feed of the page to build a community with other like-minded businesses. If you are a business that likes to share relevant content to your own page, this will cut down a lot of that time and makes monitoring sharable content much easier.

You also have an easier way to track notifications which are particularly helpful if you manage multiple pages. Switching to your business page shows the dedicated notifications of just that page, you'll no longer have your personal notifications mixed up with your business’, making it easier to reply to comments and see who's interacting with your content!

If you have multiple admins on your page or would like to add additional admins, you will now have the option of making them either an admin with Facebook access or someone with task access. Granting someone Facebook access basically gives them the same authorisations as an admin had when it came to classic Pages but if you give someone task access the person will have to manage the page from the Meta Business Suite.

You will, however, as many of you may have already noticed, lose the ability to post jobs, appointments and offers. You also don’t have the option to temporarily unpublish a page; instead, the wording has changed and you would need to temporarily deactivate the page. These options may be reintegrated in the future though but we can’t say for sure!

Soon all pages will be updated to the new Pages experience, so we find the benefits outweigh the negatives and the sooner you can take some time to get to grips with the new page experience the more advantage you can take of it, driving your social media efforts further. 

Insights

Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the new experience is the reduction in insights data. This is because along with the new Pages experience, something called Meta Business Suite is being continually developed to help you manage your page, which definitely lessens the blow as there are some seriously helpful additions to Meta services! 

Meta Business Suite is your one shop stop for scheduling, analytics and notifications and is where your more in-depth insight information lies. The tool is linked directly from Facebook on the left-hand side when on your page which opens up a new window. We’ll go into a little more detail about navigating Meta Business Suite in our next blog so stay tuned! 👀

Fear not if you don’t see any of these changes though, it may be that your page has not yet migrated to the new version of Pages. But soon all pages will change and the option to revert back to the classic experience will no longer exist - so it's worth being prepared for these changes if your page hasn't made the jump just yet. 

If you need support with your digital marketing and want to learn more about how to get the most out of your social media efforts please don't hesitate to get in touch.