Facebook Changes Good for Business

If you’re like millions of other people, you’ve got a Facebook page. You probably noticed the new Facebook interface that rolled out in the last week. There’s a whole new round of people grumbling and starting groups like “We hate the new Facebook” etc. I predict, that similar to the last Facebook facelift, people will get used to the new interface, and realize its merits.

Whether the new layout, with all its Twitter-esque features will be accepted, is not the point of this post. From a social marketing standpoint, the new changes will prove to be beneficial for business. The Facebook Pages have undergone some changes to look and act more like real profile pages.

A Facebook business page can now:

• Add status updates
• Post on walls
• Comment on links
• Add applications easily

The key to the new Facebook Pages development is the news feed opportunity. With the old Facebook, any updates you made to your site basically happened in a vacuum. Your fans were not notified of your activity unless you sent out a special mass message – which seemed sort of overboard for every small tweak. Now with the new Page design, any activity, whether photo adding or status updates will show up in fans’ newsfeeds.

For example, I’m a fan of Allure magazine. They posted some photos from a recent photoshoot. When I logged in to my Facebook account that posting made it into my newsfeed.

For businesses, the easy access to fans newsfeeds’ means more opportunity to interact with fans in real-time. As fans add your business to their network, they’re opening the door much wider for  you to communicate with them.

It remains to be seen how this development will effect the amount of Facebookers subscribing to brand pages. With the new newsfeed access fans might feel there’s too much sharing going on, and they might delete their relationship altogether. That’s the only potential negative possibility I see.

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