Major change happening that will affect Facebook Pages for business. Are you ready for the change?

Yesterday, Facebook announced the roll-out of their new-look Page layout with a post on their blog (https://www.facebook.com/business/news/UK-A-Streamlined-Look-for-Pages), the main features of which are a move to a single column of posts and easier access to admin tools.

However, one aspect that seems to have been glossed over and possibly is the biggest impact for Facebook Pages for Business. It is the apparent loss of Apps from the page.

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If you’re not familiar with Page Apps, they’re the buttons that sit just below the Cover Photo area at the top of your Page. On new pages these just show the number of likes, but on many sites, these have been changed to offer additional content or options to viewers, such as linking to the website for the business or to a page showing videos. Some sophisticated pages have even used this function to provide shopping to users, so for some page owners, loosing them could be a pretty big deal.

The changes just bring the desktop version of your page in to line with the mobile version, which hasn’t been showing Apps for as long as i’ve been using it (which is a while now).  Annoyingly, this does mean that it’s now much harder to redirect people from your page to your website and will put even more emphasis on brands to provide interesting content (not a bad thing) with photos and video being the most popular with users.

You will still be able to push viewers to your Apps pages by using Facebook Ads so all is not completely lost but the use of this feature will change as a result. They’ll no longer be static pages that provide further information, they’ll now become dynamic content that will change more often – perhaps used to provide special offers or more time-dependent content such as a competition or viral video.

It’s an interesting development from Facebook that will impact the way brands use their pages. We’ll have to work much harder to provide interesting, valuable content for viewers and perhaps think differently about the strategy behind our Facebook page.

I’d love to know your thoughts on the changes. Please comment below.

Update 16th March 2014
Panic over! It seems that Facebook gave us all an unnecessary scare over Apps. According to this article and after post from Facebook showing a different page screenshot, the apps are now on the left hand side of the page layout and much lower down.

Looking at this layout I actually think they’re in a better position than currently. The problem with where they are now is that a user will scroll down to view the top content from the timeline. With the new design, when they scroll they will be seen (certainly until the user scrolls further down).

Time will tell but we’ll be watching with interest to see how it will effect click through rates.