What do the Facebook Page layout changes mean for my local business?
- Posted by wainscot
- On March 19, 2014

If there’s one thing that’s remained constant with Facebook since its creation in 2004, it’s change.
In 2012, the traditional “wall” design for Pages was replaced with the “Timeline”. Facebook users tend to be initially resistant to change- a poll by SodaHead in early 2012 showed that 70% didn’t like the Timeline design.
Earlier this month, Facebook unveiled yet another set of changes to come to Pages.
You may have noticed the addition of the Pages to Watch feature, which we wrote a blog post about last week. Pages to Watch enables page admins to compare some of their stats to other Pages similar to theirs- this lets you keep an eye on your competitors to then boost your own traffic.
With the current design, Facebook Page Admins can add custom apps to their page. These can include games, a link to purchase tickets or order products, videos, a custom event calendar, etc. With the new design, however, it’s not clear where these custom apps will be located, or what that will mean for businesses. It looks like they’ll be hidden under the “more” option, but since the new layout has not been made fully available yet this isn’t known for sure. Our friends at Hubspot, however, don’t think it looks good
For Monmouth Health & Life, we have a tab for all of our videos and another for users to purchase tickets to the Best of Monmouth event. Anyone who stops by the page will quickly see where they can purchase tickets, but with the changes being made to Page Tabs, this won’t be quite so visible. Will this negatively impact our ticket sales? It’s too early to tell, but it’s possible.
However, some changes appear to be for the better- with this new switch in layout, Facebook Pages will now have their content featured in one column. This will make them more similar to the current design of personal profiles and the original pre-Timeline design.
As you can see with Facebook for Business’s Page, the one-column design puts activity from your Friends in an easy-to-see spot. If I see that a lot of my friends are engaged with a page, I know it’s more likely to be something that would interest me. And having all status updates in one column will mean no more reading back-and-forth in order to see all posts.
As with the changes Facebook has rolled out in the past, we expect that there will be a “grace period” where you can choose to “opt-in” to the new layout for your Page before the design becomes mandatory for all.
For now, if you’d like to be one of the first to switch over, select the “Join Waitlist” option that will pop up when you log in as a Page Admin. You can learn more about the new design here. We’ll let you know when we get access to the new design and find out more from others who have gotten access.
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