I’ve written before with tips about how to optimise your Facebook business page. During the last few weeks, though, Facebook has been updating the “page experience” for thousands of small businesses’ pages – and some of your previous settings will need to be reviewed.
First of all, Facebook business pages are now just called Pages. If you maintain one for your business, there are many ways to optimise it to benefit your customers. For example, include a great company description, your contact details and opening hours. There are other fields to complete too, to help showcase your services or products.
New Pages experience
Before your Page updates to the “new Pages experience”, you should see a pop-up appear like this:
Once you have made the switch, the good news is that all your previous Posts will still be visible, along with your posted photos and videos. Also, any info about your Services (or Shop) will still be there. One of the main benefits of this 2022 update, that Facebook talks about too, is being able to like and follow other businesses as your business, rather than personally.
Downsides
The bad news, though, includes:
- Your previous ‘About’ information (with 255 characters available) is now limited to only 100 characters (displayed as your ‘Intro’ on the Posts page). This is one of the fields you should really make the best use of, so it’s worth editing this now* to shout something succinct, within 100 characters.
- Your previous ‘Additional information’ write-up (with 10,000 characters available) is still visible, but now hidden within the About tab, under ‘Details about [business name]’. It is definitely worth optimising this text as well*, maybe to include any information now missing from the previous 255-character ‘About’ description… and maybe to include more useful info to take full advantage of this larger character limit.
- Also, there seem to be some downsides with the new layout, which hopefully Facebook will address soon. For example, there is less flexibility with what you can select to display (e.g. the order that the tabs are displayed), but note you are able to de-select some tabs, like Sport, TV, Films, Books, if they are irrelevant to you.
* If you’d like any help with writing/editing these company descriptions, you can ask Site Review UK. This is something we have done for many clients already, as well as writing enticing Services/product descriptions.
All the best, Simon Anderson
Site Review UK
PS Here are some of Facebook’s own pages about the changes:
Switch back to classic Pages from the new Pages experience
About likes and follows for the new Pages experience
Access and Page roles for new Pages
Unavailable features for new Pages
