With over 500 million subscribers, Facebook is one of the most popular social networking sites in the world. Serving close to 1 billion visitors per month, the website connects people with friends and relatives. It has also emerged as a global social network for businesses, particularly in the business to consumer market (b2c).
Just a few months ago, Facebook announced major changes to its “algorithm” which makes up its core social networking functions such as the Like and Share buttons. The updates addressed key usability and user experience areas aiming to reduce double posts and improving the way shared posts travel through the communinity. Advert targeting was another key area of improvement with major changes to how paid adverts show on the pages as well as tools for advertisers.
As the industry is still reacting and responding to these changes, Facebook announced another set of improvements to its platform. This time, the updates focus on improving the page design and information layout. Here is a quick summary of the new changes:
The Timeline
The Timeline was introduced in an earlier update and has been upgraded to become the main view for business and personal pages. It also replaced “the wall” as the default view for pages.
This time round, the Timeline has been cleaned up making posts appear in a straight line downwards on the right of the page. This replaces the alternating alignment of the old layout which was deemed confusing to replace it with a linear feed for viewers to scroll through.
The positions of tabs and options on the left side of the screen have also been reshuffled to include a map of your location and other business details. These tabs can also be reordered by the page admin as needed.
The Cover Pic
The page name and title will now show over your cover picture saving space from the main page. The Like, Follow and Share options are also shown over your cover pic to save space. These updates make the page look cleaner and help to make these options easier to locate. Luckily for all you page admins, the size of the cover pic has not changed. You will however need to check that the new information overlay does not cover up any important part of your picture.
Page Stats
Key Page Statistics are now automatically displayed on the top right corner for page administrators. This means that you get to view the really important numbers straight away without having to dig it up from the stats pages, which are still available from your menu.
Page Watch
Facebook have been trialing this new feature for a few weeks now whereby you can add pages to a watch list to keep an eye on their updates and developments. The new thing about this feature is that the sites you choose will not know who is “watching” their page making it a perfect tool to keep an eye on competitors and similar pages.
Most of the above features and updates has so far been rolled out onto the desktop version of the site. Only very minor updates have been performed on the mobile site and none to the Facebook mobile app.
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