As it often is with Facebook, they’ve rolled out some recent changes to our pages without really making a big deal of it. Certain aspects are brought to our attention via ‘hint’ popups, but others are slightly better hidden in the depths of the Settings tab – still, they’re all options a Facebook user should know to get the absolute best out of their pages. That said, let’s do a little rundown of everything, so we’re all on the same – ahem – page.
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Customising your Timeline
Game changer number one is surprisingly simple – from a page admin’s point of view that is. Facebook has now included the option of customising your timeline and managing the order of your side bar, making sure your page’s most important information is what captures a customer’s eyes. The Template feature has several different page styles to choose from, depending on the nature of your page and designed specifically to cater to the needs of the admins and the browsers. Besides the ‘Standard’ layout, there are the following:
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Business – Helping you manage your business, including ways to post special offers.
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Venues – For highlighting useful information such as the venue’s hours, location and upcoming events.
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Shopping – Enabling the showcasing of products and to make it easy for people to shop online.
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Politicians – Helping politicians reach their supporters and communicate their message.
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Professional Services – Designed to help people find the page’s services and get in touch.
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Restaurants and Cafes – Highlighting photos and important information about the menu, hours and location.
To apply a template and change the order of your timeline, click on the ‘Manage Tabs’ link in the left sidebar of your page.
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Add Partner Apps and Services
It’s quite likely that you already have a button on your page (i.e. Send Message, Call Now, Learn More etc.), but did you know there’s a whole host of external apps you can use as well? If you click ‘+See Options’ at the bottom of any click down menu within the button editing window, you can see the list of partner services currently offered, giving you an even wider range of options for your customers. Some of these services are paid for, but if it brings more ease to bookings/orders, helps boost your reach, or makes things run just that little bit more smoothly, the extra pennies can definitely be worth it.
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Linking to Instagram & Cross-posting Videos
Once again found in the many tabs of your settings, you can find the option to attach your Instagram account directly to your page. This will allow you to create Facebook ads that run on Facebook, but also post the same ad to Instagram – this was available previously, even without attaching an Instagram account, but now the process has been simplified and made available to everyone with a Facebook ad account via the Power Editor, without the need to go through Business Manager. The benefits of attaching your Instagram mean you’ll be able to respond to any comments on your advert, as well as the handle and profile picture actually being clickable and not greyed out.
Another multi-faceted option now available is the ability to share content, i.e. videos, across more than one page. If you have multiple pages, no longer do you need to go to each one and upload separately, no, instead now you can set up a cross-posting relationship between the pages. This allows the pages to share videos and video post insights – pretty self-explanatory how helpful this is to someone managing several pages at once! Again, found in your settings, this can all be simply set up in the ‘Crossposting’ tab.
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New “Write Something” Box
Last, but most certainly not least, is the swanky new options for creating a post. As you’ll see, there are now plenty of options aside simply writing a few sentences, or adding a photo or video. Now, you have options to create events, offers, and advertise in other creative ways.
This update means getting out posts to your costumers and clientele in the simplest and most compact way possible, jumping directly to the point while having all the relevant information right at their fingertips, including all the right buttons to send them straight through to purchase/booking. It doesn’t get much easier than that!
Happy posting!
Rikki
