Yesterday, Facebook rolled out the newly redesigned Pages – business pages now look like user profile pages, with tabs and more functionality to customize and engage with fans. (Actually, the Pages are actually now called “profiles for public figures and organizations). See excerpt from the official Facebook blog:
“Starting today, we are announcing new profiles for public figures and organizations. Once called Pages, these new profiles will now begin looking and functioning just like user profiles. Just as you connect with friends on Facebook, you can now connect and communicate with celebrities, musicians, politicians and organizations. These folks will now be able to share status updates, videos, photos or anything else they want, in the same way your friends can already. You’ll be able to keep up with all of their activity in your News Feed. This means that you can find out that Oprah is reading a book backstage before a show, CNN posted a breaking story or U2 is working on a new song, just as you would see that your friend uploaded new photos from her trip to Europe.”
The title of that blog post by Mark Zuckerberg was “Improving Your Ability to Share and Connect” and it nicely sums up what the new Facebook changes are all about: Facebook is not only giving businesses more opportunities to interact with fans, but it is making brands and marketers more accountable for their profiles and online activities. Now, all content uploads and changes to the Pages (er, Profiles) are streamed in and more visible to the fans. Tabs are customizable, giving the brands valuable space for content and application development. And fan interaction and social activity integration must now be part of daily management/strategy.
The change will woo marketers as we are given more opportunities to be engaging and relevant. By basically mirroring individual user profiles (see Red Bull profile below), brands are literally becoming “one of us”:
It also further proves that social media is integral to marketing strategies, and that it’s not just about setting up profiles and leaving it like that; instead social media is about socializing!
More changes on Facebook coming soon (regarding the homepage, how it is becoming more like Twitter, etc) so we’ll be writing more blog posts about it and keep you all updated. Stay tuned!!
