If you operate a ‘page’ on Facebook – by which we mean a page for a business, sports team, band, or interest aside from your own personal page, you might be about to see it change dramatically in the next few days. If you haven’t checked on your page for a while, you might want to go and take a look at it because the company might have made changes already. Facebook has been doing a lot of spring cleaning and redesigning during the past twelve months, and that spirit of renewal has finally reached its ‘Pages’ section. The changes are mandatory, cannot be opted out of, and are happening right now.
Changes to ‘Pages’ probably became inevitable the moment that the social media network revamped its profile pages late last year, making them all ‘dark’ by default and significantly altering the layout. The revised profile pages and news feeds reminded many people of online slots websites, with all of the ‘main attractions’ placed in a central column with buttons and less important options shifted to the sides. This is how online slots websites position their games and arrange their navigation menus, and that might not be a coincidence. The psychology of websites where rose casino are played has been studied extensively in recent years because of their enormous success, and elements of their design are beginning to appear elsewhere on the wider web.
Because the ‘personal’ side of Facebook had seen significant changes, but the ‘Pages’ aspect had not, the overall look and feel of ‘Pages’ had begun to look dated by default. That will no longer be the case as we head deeper into 2021. The biggest and most obvious change that most people will notice is that the ‘Like’ button has now vanished from ‘Pages’ entirely. Instead, visitors to a page will see how many followers it has. This will probably be news to anyone who didn’t realize there’s a distinction between ‘liking’ a page and ‘following’ a page, but there is – and if you have fewer ‘likes’ than ‘follows,’ you might be best advised to invite all of the people who ‘like’ you to ‘follow’ you, so your page doesn’t suddenly start to appear less popular.
The majority of the changes being made to ‘Pages’ appear to be intended to make them look and feel more like ‘regular’ Facebook profile pages. As part of this, page owners will now be able to use their pages to post short-form video content and have it automatically disappear after 24 hours and do the same with pictures. This is an identical feature to Facebook ‘Stories,’ which were introduced as an attempt to stave off competition from Snapchat several years ago. Users can also look forward to being able to host Reddit-style ‘Ask Me Anything’ question and answer sessions through their pages and posting onto a brand-new ‘news feed’ for pages. The latter move is, presumably, a response to the numerous complaints of page owners who say that their page posts don’t appear in the news feeds of the people who follow their pages no matter whether they follow them or not.
This will be old news to a few high-profile page owners. Facebook always conducts small beta tests before rolling large-scale changes out to all users, and so these alterations to ‘Pages’ were tested with owners of high-profile accounts – including some A-list Hollywood celebrities – during late 2020. That’s allowed brands to make posts on comment threads in ways that pages have never been able to do in the past. A person who owns a page can now comment publicly on trends, topics, and other comment threads just as easily as they’d be able to if they were using their own account. Facebook hopes that this will open up new communication lines between brands, celebrities, other types of page owners, and the people who follow them.
As is generally the case when changes are made on Facebook, things are tossed out to make way for new features. Aside from ‘Likes’ being made a thing of the past, some back-end admin options will be disappearing too. It isn’t immediately clear what’s going to be cut in terms of options, but that information should become available as the changes are rolled out over the course of the next few months. Facebook says it needs to simplify the interface to make it easier for users to switch between their personal profile and their page profile at the click of a button, so presumably, some of the lesser-used options will disappear in the process. The company is keen to point out that no commercial options will disappear, and so if you’re accustomed to using Facebook’s advertising tools in a certain way to promote your page, you can rest assured that you’ll still be able to do so in the future.
After the full list of alterations to ‘Pages’ is rolled out, Facebook’s next target will presumably be ‘Groups,’ which haven’t seen any significant changes in the past five years. Such is the dated look of ‘Groups’ that an option is still provided for group administrators to revert back to ‘Classic’ Facebook mode for 48 hours to make it easier to perform administrative actions. Making large-scale changes to groups is likely to be a complicated process for the company because of the sheer scale of the largest groups, which have millions of members and, therefore, a lot of people likely to complain if the changes are confusing or sudden. Nevertheless, the part of Facebook given over to groups now looks significantly older and less user-friendly than any other part of the website, and so change is likely to be inevitable. We expect that to be either a late 2021 or early 2022 project.
Nothing stays the same forever on Facebook. Just as you’re getting accustomed to one layout, another one appears and leaves you scrambling to work out where everything is again. It might take a little while to get used to the new look of ‘Pages’ – especially if it’s been some time since you last checked on your page’s performance – but hopefully, this new format will make them easier to run and maintain.
