Twit-oogle-book: Facebook Fan Page Redesign Exemplifies Change in Social Media Marketing

If you use social media in your company’s marketing strategy, you’ve probably noticed that your Facebook fan pages have a new look.  In case you’re unfamiliar with the term, Facebook fan pages are designed for businesses, brands, media, and public figures to interact with their target audience and current customers.  Similar to the profile redesign discussed in our blog Facebook Gets Facelift, fan page administrators will now be privy to a slew of tools to further enhance their fans’ user experience.

This redesign includes changes that make fan pages look (and perform) more like personal profiles: you can “like” other fan pages, display photos in a chronological viewer, and use the profile not only as yourself, but on behalf of the business represented by the fan page.  The new option of automatically filtering exactly what is allowed to be displayed on your page is exciting for those of us deeply involved with reputation management and public relations. While we’ve always had the power to manually sift through each individual post, and use the magic “x” at the top of a post to delete something, the new pages allow administrators to create a block that will screen potentially harmful material.

This new filter will further empower businesses because it can screen for things like profanity, as well as individually defined negative words (i.e.- posts from competing businesses).  Facebook is looking at immense commercial growth potential with these changes too: there is now even more screen real estate devoted to clickable ad space, links to upgrade an existing Facebook advertising campaign, etc. on either edge of the profile. While the new Facebook fan page changes may seem insignificant to consumers, the increased integration of real-time updates and advertising space signals a melding of Twitter, Facebook, and even search engine optimization to marketers and advertisers.

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