Facebook Pages: A Second Look at New Features

Some of Facebook’s new features that have been rolled out for pages have been covered at Facebook Fan Page: New Layout and Features

However, there are a few tidbits not covered under that article. Here they are:

1. Have you ever faced a situation where you were co-owner of a page and wanted your comments to be separated from other co-owners? Being the admin of a group, everyone gets to post as ‘page name‘. Pretty confusing for the visitors and fans as they won’t know who is who, if there are two or three of you answering on the same threads.

   The only way to do this before was to have a central admin account to post statuses (as page name) and then post comments via your personal profiles. But that is now changed. You can post as yourself or as the page from the same profile.

   • Click Edit Page
   • Your Settings
   • There will be a checkbox saying: Always comment and post on your page as ErumMunir.com even when using Facebook as Erum Munir (the page name and profile name will be replaced by yours).
   • Uncheck this box

   All your posts including statuses and comments will be made from your personal profile. However, even though you may want your comments to be from your personal profile, you will most probably want your statuses to look official and be posted under the page name to differentiate them from other posters.

   Look in the right margin and you will see the option to Post as ‘your page name’. Click this. You can now post as the page. To switch back just click Post as ‘your profile name’.

2. Have a long list of pages you have liked? But there might be a few you want to highlight all the time on your business page.

   • Click Edit Page
   • Click Featured
   • Click ‘Add Featured Likes’
   • Choose the pages you want highlighted at all times. You can choose up to a maximum of 5.
3. On the same page you can also choose to feature yourself as a page owner. Thus making it easy for any prospective clients to get in touch with you directly. This depends on whether you want to remain as a private entity behind the business or if you want to be recognized as the business owner.

These are some really good features added by Facebook.

However, there is one very important feature they have taken away. This is the option to view posts by Everyone Else on your page. You do not want to miss queries by your customers. Some of these might get posted on your page. However, Facebook has made it very difficult to find them.

1. Although you may receive email notifications of postings by others, if you click the link to take you to the posting it opens up your profile page. Or the wall for your page if you are signed in as your page.
2. This might have been fine had the postings been sorted according to the timeline. However, other people’s posts are completely randomized. Some go right at the bottom, while those with some activity may make it to the top. The problem with this is, you have to find the post in order to reply to it. That usually takes a lot of scrolling and guesswork as to its actual location.

This was just a bad move on Facebook’s part. Like they say if it ain’t broken, don’t fix it. In this case they just took away something that was working perfectly fine.

Chances are this will lead to a lot of frustration. But and thankfully for it, there is an admin view which does indeed let you view your posts chronologically.

So a lot of good features, though I’m not sold on the randomization of posts on the wall according to weightage that is calculated by Facebook. They cannot decide what is important and what is not. It all depends on the nature of the page.