RI Facebook Brand Page Updates

©2011 Resource Interactive. All rights reserved. February 16, 2011 | 1

RESOURCE INTERACTIVE

Facebook Changes to Brand Pages On Thursday, February 10

th, Facebook announced an anticipated redesign for Pages affecting

brands, businesses, celebrities and media figures. You‟re likely already familiar with the new page design from your personal page, and now many of those same changes, including a few others, are extended to Pages. The changes revolve around 4 key areas: layout, administrative functions, moderation of content and technical updates. Brands have until March 10

th to preview these changes, but after this date

all Pages will automatically switch to the new design and functionality. Page owners and administrators must take action now to address these changes. We‟ve included our recommendations below each of these main points:

1. Explore the new layout, and how to take advantage of the new thumbnail presentation.

o Select appropriate image, size and quality (resolution) to ensure the best experience possible in the new image viewer.

o Select icons to appear at the top of your Pages or next to applications. o Brands must now more carefully consider strategies to drive traffic into sub-

pages, shopping apps and custom content with the removal of the tab approach.

2. Carefully experiment with new administrative settings to understand how your communication strategy may be impacted.

o Create or use existing test pages and get comfortable with how to toggle between new settings to post on the brand page (i.e., between personal page and as a brand admin).

o Identify who has the authority to speak on behalf of the brand (i.e. brand spokesperson, customer service teams, or brand only).

o Ensure you are not using a personal profile to toggle and post on the brand page. Instead, create a business-specific profile if you use this tactic.

3. Decide how you want to leverage the new moderation tools. o Use the keyword-based spam filter tool to take quick action when your page is

being spammed by building unique filters to mass-exclude comments that follow a predictable pattern.

o Consider what profanity filter level is appropriate for your brand.

4. Evaluate the technical changes introduced by the use of iFrames on pages. o Consider how your custom content can be integrated using this approach and

have a more seamless experience within Facebook (without the reliance on the Canvas app).

o Distributed Commerce Platform users should not need any significant changes made beyond minor tweaks to the UX and style guide, since this change aligns with our current implementation approach using iFrames.

Overall, these are beneficial changes for brands, and should help enable more functionality, control, and an enhanced set of presentation options. The following takes a deeper look at individual changes specific to your branded Facebook page.



1. Layout Changes and Images The most visible change is the removal of tabs across the top of the page, which moved to the left navigation under the profile picture. The list of apps now includes icons displayed next to each name. There are now five thumbnail images stretched above the wall, which display the last five images posted to the brand's wall by an administrator. The inclination to leverage the 5 photo spots for a continuous image may be apparent; however, Facebook has these spots set up for randomization. You can use these spots for standalone images that follow a cohesive aesthetic that feature new product launches or programs.

Figure 1: Layout changes shown in the example with Levi's highlighting core products in thumbnail images

The tabs, which previously appeared horizontally across the top of the wall, have been moved to the left side below the profile image. This is a significant change to the user flow, which in our opinion will reduce the page views for most brands on custom content and shopping apps, at least in the short term until users become familiar with the new layout. As a result, brands should incorporate this into messaging strategies and test tactics to drive fan engagement across these apps. It remains to be seen how this will positively or negatively impact views of sub-pages and custom content, and we will be watching it closely.

Two minor changes also coincided with this move. Icons now appear next to applications and sub-pages, and the space allows for more text to appear describing your sub-pages. While application icons are small, we expect these will provide smart visual cues to users that can help draw attention to these apps. Brands should think about icon design unique to each application or sub-page.

2. Changes to Admin Functionality

The most notable change to admin functionality includes the ability to log in as the brand. To enable this, a toggle has been created to switch between the user‟s role of page administrator or as your own profile. The result is that users with Admin rights can now post content on the brand page as themselves.



Figure 2: Page administrator toggle options between "self" and "admin" (brand) page

This change gives brands the ability to assign representatives (i.e., customer service, marketing manager or celebrity) to communicate to their fans directly on the brand page on behalf of the brand. Through the "Featured" portion within the admin page settings, Pages can choose to identify and visually represent a "Page Owner" by selecting an administrator to be visually identified on the wall as associated with the brand. This should help add credibility and authenticity.

Figure 3: Option to select “Add Featured Page Owners”

Because Page administrators featured as Page Owners will display the profile image associated with the user profile, brands employing this tactic should create brand-appropriate profiles different from personal profiles. Brands should ensure representatives message users as themselves, and indicate they are from the brand if it isn‟t obvious from the username. For brands that already allow everyone to post on the wall, the new format will facilitate increased engagement with fans, because brands can now use representatives to address specific topics, provide celebrity endorsements or unique content, or address customer service issues head-on. Brands should begin thinking about how these tools will impact their communication strategy and develop guidelines around posting on fans‟ pages and other Brand pages, which is now possible. A consequence of these changes will also mean discussing how Brands should deal with other Brands, including competitors, who may also post directly to the Brand wall. The new tools introduced in content moderation will be useful to Brands in this situation.



3. Moderation Facebook has added moderation tools within the page permissions for Facebook admins, most notably greater flexibility for keyword filters and profanity levels. Brands should identify how to use the new moderation settings and perform due diligence to see potential overlaps with existing, 3

rd party moderation tools.

Admins can now set up keyword spam filters, triggering comments or posts including blocklisted keywords to be automatically marked as spam. It is important to note that when content is marked as spam, it is hidden from the overall brand fan community, yet the post remains viewable for the person who posted the comment. In essence, a person is not notified that their post has been block listed and removed.

Figure 4: Moderation blocklist featured within page administrators "Manage Permissions"

Profanity filters are now offered by Facebook, which will block the most commonly reported words and phrases marked as offensive by the broader community. Pages administrators can now specify filtering levels of “Strong”, “Medium”, and the default setting of “None”. This new functionality will aid brands in the automatic moderation of their pages. Brands can test the setting by using a “Medium” filter and adjusting accordingly.

Page administrators will notice that the ability to sort by “Brand + Others”, “Just Brand”, “Others” and “Spam” has been revised to sort by “Everyone” and “Brand”. Brands should identify how to filter pages for their fans, either by “Everyone” or by “Brand”. Start by selecting “Brand” only to eliminate the clutter for your users.



4. Technical Changes Tab applications can now be built with iFrames, allowing for functionality that was previously reserved for Canvas applications to now be implemented into Tab applications. Tab applications are now essentially portals to load externally hosted web content. The introduction of iFrames means other improvements for the user experience. Clicking to activate Flash content is no longer necessary, and „Like‟ buttons are now officially supported in Tab applications.

However, FBML is no longer supported and will be deprecated on March 11th. All applications that

have been created with FBML will continue to work indefinitely, but future applications must use the iFrame implementation. Our Distributed Commerce Platform in the tab is already built using iFrames and does not rely on the Canvas application. Therefore, we don‟t expect any changes to our solution beyond making adjustments to the user experience and style guide to ensure a seamless presentation to the user.

In Conclusion

We think this is a round of positive improvements for both brands and the Facebook community. The majority of activity is already focused within the stream, and the page layout changes reflect an effort to de-clutter the stream experience. Unfortunately the impact to traffic driven to unique, custom content on the former Tab design is not yet known. In the meantime, brands should continue to focus on engaging messaging in the newsfeed to draw attention to custom content.

For brands, the changes also mean a more sophisticated and targeted approach to the communication strategy, along with enhanced tools that are long overdue.

Several brands have already taken the plunge and are using the new layout. It doesn‟t hurt to just dive in as well, provided you have actively tested the experience prior to making the switch, as there are clear differences between the old and new version that must be understood. As an admin, you want to be comfortable with the changes and how to maneuver in this new layout.

Figure 5: Old and new admin filter options.



If you need further assistance, our Social Marketing & Media team at Resource Interactive is happy to walk you through the changes in more detail. Contact Andy Kennemer by email at [email protected], or by phone at 614.410.2185.

mailto:[email protected]

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RI Facebook Brand Page Updates