Hey Brands, warm up to embrace the new Facebook Pages design

Early this March, Facebook announced the rollout of its new design for Pages. Of course, as an agency which works with a number of brands across the globe on their social media presence and campaigns, we were very excited to see what was in store for us. Over the years we have seen Facebook rollout many new features and redesigns. We loved some and we hated some. As the new design slowly makes its foray on many pages, here is our first take on it.

One of the first things that a page owner will notice, is the elegant display of the weekly page stats on the right. We really like this change and give it a thumbs up. It gives us a quick overview of the key metrics and provides notifications that help us serve our brand’s community better. On hovering over each metric in this box, a small popup appears and gives a more detailed insight. The dimensions of the cover image and profile pic continues to remain the same. The page ‘Like’ button now appears on top of the cover image, saving a lot of space, but also making it little hard to see.
The old mini admin panel on the top is gone. This was a piece of crap anyways ! Facebook used this space to do some cheap advertising to get brand owners to blindly throw money on facebook page likes. They also provided a bunch of other useless features like ‘invite a friend’, ‘post level reach stats’ and ‘pages to watch’ that did no good. We are happy to see this go as well!
The quick links below the cover image have undergone a major change. In the old layout we had nice little ‘eye catching’ thumbnails, especially for apps that were hosted on the page. The thumbnails are gone and the current design leaves room to feature just a single app with the name of the app featuring in the quick links bar. The rest of the apps have been moved a little lower on the page and now hides on one corner, barely catching our attention. We think this will pose a major challenge for brands that are planning on running multiple campaigns using facebook apps. The apps may no longer receive the kind of visibility that they once did.
Say hello to the new single column timeline. Looks a lot cleaner and definitely a better representation of chronological posts. As with the old design, you can find the post reach stats (organic and paid) at the bottom of the post. However, the visual representation of it using hues of orangish-mustard is just a lot better. The width of the page post has increased and is now about 511 px compared to the earlier 403 px.
As for the page apps themselves, they load right below the cover image now. Which mean that the crucial real estate is taken up by the cover pic and not by you app. This is definitely a bad design choice by Facebook. It’s now advisable for apps to move all the important pieces of information to the top of the app where it might catch your community’s attention. We hope that Facebook would, in the due course, make changes to this feature.
Overall, I think the new design is refreshing. It also looks a lot like the layout that facebook had back in 2010, when you think of the single column timeline and the various apps featuring on the left column, etc. But as with all the previous designs, I feel brands and users will get used to it. New creative ideas will emerge on how brands can make the new design work for them.