It’s the first week of January and Facebook have annouced some pretty big changes to business pages on the platform – all about creating that new pages experience! The big change everyone is talking about? Removing the LIKE feature! No more will you be able to LIKE a page, but you will instead be able to follow a page.
If you already have a business page on Facebook, you’ll probably have noticed that for a while you have had a Like count, and a Follower count. People can like your page and choose to unfollow it – meaning they still like it, but won’t actually see any of your content. We’ve been saying for a while that it’s time to ignore the likes away, but this move by Facebook just really reinforces that.
At the moment, you can choose to switch to the new page experience if you are a business on Facebook, but we’re sure it won’t be long before the switch becomes necessary (remember when they switched to ‘new’ Facebook in September 2020? That had been available as an option for months!).
Switching to the new page experience and what you need to know
- If you do have people that don’t follow you on the ‘classic’ page experience, they won’t be following you when you switch. Now, really that just means nothing changes for you, but you might see a bit less people on that follower count than you were perhaps expecting if you usually only consider the amount of Likes.
- The new page experience has a new design layout (yippee… or not! Let’s see shall we).
- Easy way to switch between your profile and pages
- Updated page management – you can give your page admins full or partial control
- A dedicated news feed for your page – we love this idea, and missed it when it was removed many moons ago. It’ll be great to get this back because you’ll easier be able to communicate with who your business cares about. For a while we’ve definitely felt that this feature has been missing, and why other platforms are so good for business.
- Updated insights which will easier help you understand your audience
Time to say goodbye to
- Page likes – yep, we’ve talked about this already
- Classic page roles
- Publishing tools – we knew this was coming, and it’s something we’ve said a lot in webinars at the end of 2020 – say hello to the creator studio and Business Manager
- Business features – yes, jobs, appointments, offers and Marketplace listings are GOING. This will be very interesting and a huge curve ball.
- Classic features like reviews, check-ins and templates.
Looks like we’ll need to completely rewrite our Facebook webinar then!