Updating to the New Facebook Page Experience

Changes to be aware of as Facebook completes the roll out of the new Pages experience.

What is the new Page experience?

According to Facebook, “The new Page experience is a way for you to manage your professional presence on Facebook.”

In addition to a new page layout, the biggest change that you’ll be seeing is easy-switching between your business Page and your individual profile. There are separate feeds for your Page and for your individual profile. This makes it easy for brands to interact with other brands, keep the feed clean, and help avoid unprofessional mistakes.

According to Facebook, all your Page content including posts, videos, stories, groups you page will automatically move to the new Page. Facebook has been rolling out the new interface over the past year or so, and the transition should now be complete for most accounts. Meta recently announced that you won’t have a choice to switch back to the classic Facebook Page interface going forward.

switching from personal Facebook profile to the new Pages experience
Switching from your personal Facebook profile to your business Page

What else is new?

Professional Dashboard is the new tab to access analytics insights, manage content and events. It also houses links to Ads Center, engagement tools, linked accounts, and acts as the gateway to the Business Suite.

The professional dashboard displays top-level overview of Reach, Audience and Page Engagement metrics for the past 7, 14, 28 and 90 day blocks.

Professional dashboard screen in the new Page experience
Professional dashboard screen in the new Page experience

 

Audience insights in the new Page experience
Audience Insights

One major change from the Classic setup with respect to analytics is the ability to export Page and Post data from the Insights tab.  In the new Page experience, the only way to export historical data is via Meta Business Suite.

Also, the Professional Dashboard doesn’t offer age and demographics data on engaged users like the Classic dashboard did.

Facebook Page roles morph into Page access. The Page roles have now been split into two categories:

Facebook Access: Users have full or partial control to Settings, Permissions and Tasks. Someone with partial control will still be able to switch into the Page, manage content, messages, ads and community activity.

Task Access: People with Task Access can’t switch into the Page on Facebook, but can use the Business Suite, to manage specific things like content, ads or insights.

Page quality: This section displays whether your page has had any violations of Meta’s community guidelines.

You can access Page access and Page quality tabs by navigating to Settings & Privacy > Page Settings > New Pages Experience

Page Settings in the new Pages experience
Page Settings: Page access, Page quality and Page management history

Features for non-profits: Meta launched a whole suite of products geared toward non-profits which included fundraising and donations. These are now merged under Facebook Fundraising.

Page Likes are less conspicuous in the new setup. While Facebook still gives the number of net new likes in the past 28 days, it is safe to assume that Followers is the metric that Facebook wants you to track instead of Likes. For reference, Page likes are a signal to the algorithm that someone only likes a Page, whereas Page Followers signal the algorithm that they want to view and interact with your content.

If someone had previously Liked your page, they won’t be auto-transferred to the new Page as a Follower. As a result, you could possibly see a drop in your average reach, but an increase in engagement.

Featured items: One interesting feature that’s available now is the Featured items section. Business pages now have the ability to have up to six posts pinned to the top. You can pin photo, video, links, playlists and even event posts to this section.

Featured items section in the new Page experience on Facebook
Featured items section

Things to check after making the switch to the new Page

With the demise of Facebook Analytics, and now with the new Page experience, Meta is pushing the Business Suite as the single point for managing business activity on Facebook, Messenger and Instagram. I have already mentioned changes with respect to the data exports that were available previously.

Page and Task Access: CSU Facebook’s roles were mismatched when we made the switch to the new Page experience. Make sure that Facebook reflects assigned proper roles and task access after you switch.

Double check the profile image, cover image and the about info. The new Page experience allows only 100 characters for your Page intro, so make sure yours is not truncated after you make the switch.

Check if you have set up two-factor authentication for additional security. It is also recommended to view your Page as a Follower once to check for any errors.

You can find additional resources and FAQs in this new Pages guide from Facebook.