Facebook Pages Change The Face Of Business

The Facebook Bombshell

Yesterday Facebook rolled out their new look Facebook pages; They’ve made business pages become  more like personal profiles allowing more  interactivity and are set to open a doorway for  businesses and brands to gain deep penetration into the mainstream market of  Facebook users.  The people who understand these implications are rubbing their hands with glee at this new announcement.

Are Pages Hard To Find?

Facebook still make pages difficult to find, I have no idea why this is but in order to create a page you have to scroll down to the bottom of your facebook profile and click on the advertising tab, then click on pages and then click on create a page.

Public Profiles

What used to be termed Fan Pages are now being called Public Profiles. From what I have read it seems that Facebook are intent on introducing Public Profiles into the news feed. Facebook explain it like this

By leveraging the real connections between friends on Facebook, a public profile lets users connect to the entities they care about and allows you to join the conversation. Posts by the public profile will soon start to appear in News Feed, giving you a more dynamic relationship with the public figures and organizations you are interested in.

Become Viral And Interactive

What this means from a business perspective is that your Public Profile activities can now be seen by many more people as friends of friends interact with these pages. This means they are truly becoming viral in the same way Facebook groups have been for a long time.

Whether this also reflects Googles recent algorithm change that also favors known brands is debatable but it now places companies much more in the public eye than ever before, and gives them penetration into markets that were previously restricted.

Positive And Negative Response

Its difficult to asses the public reaction, from reading the comments on the Facebook blog the majority were somewhat negative, mainly from the fact that they hadn’t taken the time to discover how the new look Facebook Pages can be configured, I suspect that given time most people will begin to appreciate the changes. Personally I think it is a move in the right direction

Reputation Management

Reputation management will have to be taken more seriously with this added user interaction. But don’t get too worried because Facebook have installed a feature that allows you to control who can post to your page. In a crisis you can kill your comments and limit the viral word of mouth damage until you are ready to face the public and present your side of the story. This of course also works in your favor when you want your evangelists to tell the world how great you are.

Application Development

The new design also creates huge potential for 3rd party application developers as Fan page apps can now be placed front and center for the world to see. The best apps will spread virally  in the same way they used to before the new profile was rolled out.

You can use HTML on your page and also FBML (facebook markup language)

You control what page a user lands on and also what page a Fan lands on by adjusting the settings on your wall page. I am hoping that Facebook will extend this same privilege to normal users in the future, it is clear that they have all the coding in place, its just a matter of flicking the switch.

I am still exploring the new look pages but one of the coolest new features is the ability to demographically target your updates and messages. So if you want to test a marketing campaign in a certain city before you roll it out to the rest of the country you can select a certain test group and see their response. This is huge for any major organization or brand who want to do market research

From an SEO perspective Facebook pages are a great way to get indexed and ranked by google and this latest development only emphasizes this importance.

Find Out More From Ed Dale

Ed Dale was so excited about this new development that he will be hosting a live Ustream Broadcast this evening to discuss these momentous changes. Be sure to tune in or at least go and watch the replay on the 30 day challenge tv

I am sure that those who already understand how Facebook works can see the future potential and are already positioning themselves to take advantage of it.

I hope you enjoyed this post, I look forward to your comments, either on Facebook or on my blog

http://www.iandavidchapman.com.

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