Thumbs Up to Facebook Page Changes – Jolly Old St. Zuck Delivers Early

Update: So it turns out Facebook goofed, and accidentally leaked their new user interface before pulling the site down and reverting back.  Check out pictures of the leaked changes to Facebook pages.

You know, it’s kind of nice when you make public suggestions for a company and then they implement some of those suggestions within a week.  Not that I think Mark Zuckerberg reads our blog on a daily basis – who has time as Person of the Year – or our holiday facebook wish list, but still nice to see.

One minute I’m on a conference call with a client to discuss SEO strategies for their new site.  I check back to see if anyone has commented on our facebook page‘s most recent request for favorite fake twitter account suggestions and the layout looks different.  Not really sure why I wasn’t using hootsuite there, but glad I wasn’t.

Facebook Page Changes

So, when I logged in, I saw this at the top of the screen:

I’m not going to walk you through the profile – you can see that for yourself and, frankly, I just wanted to do a quick post about how it affects businesses without a million screenshots.  Well, here’s one more because it’s an important one.

When you navigate over to your page logged in as yourself (and this was your only option before and still kinda is from a username / password perspective), you’ll now see a “Login as Page” box at the top of the page next to your company  name:

You can then choose to log in as the administrator of your particular facebook page, or yourself or any other facebook page that you manage as has traditionally and still shows up in the Account section under Manage Pages.  You will then be able to switch accounts in this section as well.

So, while I think the new layout is a big deal in terms of how people use your site (and about the information that shows up down the left hand side), what I’m really  more excited about right now is the fact that now you will receive notification of any changes to your wall, such as comments and likes.  This functionality obviously existed before for the personal side of things, but not for pages.  Some third parties gave you some of this information (hootsuite for example showed you new comments, but not likes), but it wasn’t available on facebook.

Well done, facebook.  You’ve taken care of request #1.