Facebook Redesigns Pages, Adds Pages to Watch Feature

Facebook's new look for Pages follows changes to the News Feed last week. Pages to Watch lets brands create a list of Pages similar to their own and compare their performance with their peers.

Facebook has introduced a new streamlined look for Pages, right after it started rolling out its News Feed redesign last week.

Facebook says that the streamlined look aims to help users easily find information they want, as well as assist Page admins in finding the tools they use most.

The redesigned Pages include a right-side column of the Timeline to write Page posts in, and a left-side column to display business information such as location, operating hours, and website URL.

In addition, Facebook has added key admin tools to Pages. Page owners can now click the This Week section, located at the top right, to get stats on new likes, unread notifications, and messages. Meanwhile, Page managers can find some navigation options at the top of their Pages, and access the Ads Manager account via the Build Audience menu at the top, as shown here:

facebook-update1

Additionally, the social network has added a Pages to Watch feature in the Page Insights tool. This update enables brands to create a list of Pages similar to their own and compare their performance with their peers.

On the “Overview” tab of Page Insights, businesses can acquire key stats about the Pages they care about. On the “Posts” tab of Page Insights, companies can view the most popular posts from the Pages they are watching, as shown here:

facebook-update2

“Competitor analysis has been brought to a new level with the updated ‘Brands to Watch’ section of Facebook insights,” says Elizabeth Pace, insights and analytics manager at Social Deviant, a Chicago-based social media agency.

Pace points out that although brands were already able to track some selected competitors on a weekly basis before, they could only track the total number of likes and the increased fans that week.

“With the new Pages update, this feature will be rolled out to all Page admins and will also include the number of posts created by each competitor and the number of total engagements they each saw that week,” Pace tells ClickZ. “Also, the update will make personal and business Pages look more similar, which will create an ecosystem that allows for content to be more digestible.”

The updates to Pages and News Feed comes at a time when brands were complaining that Facebook tweaked its News Feed algorithm in a way that made it harder for them to target their Facebook followers without paying to promote their posts.

“Everyone knows that fans don’t visit Facebook Pages. They consume the Page through the News Feed,” says Thomas Guenoux, co-founder of KRDS, a Paris-based social media agency. “Doing good Facebook marketing is not to have a nice cover and a great collection of tabs. It is to create right content in the News Feed at the right moment to the right targeted section of your audience.”

Facebook doesn’t yet show where custom tabs fall within the updates to Pages.

“If tabs fall under the ‘More’ section, brands will have significantly less motivation to spend their resources developing custom tabs,” Pace tells ClickZ. She further points out that if this assumption is true, brands may presume that Facebook intends to attract ad spend instead of using those funds to develop custom tabs.

“This might actually encourage brands to create their own microsites outside of Facebook instead to host contests and content around long-running campaigns within a tab,” says Pace.

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