Facebook Page Layouts – Making Sense of Facebook’s Redesign

While it’s been months since the latest overhaul of Facebook page layouts, a lot of Facebook fan page owners and admins still wonder how to best cope with the changes. The redesign has been particularly confusing for many new users who don’t have the benefit of context to fully understand what the fuss is all about. If you belong in this category, here are some pointers to get you up to speed.

A Brief Overview

The quickest way to sum up the latest round of Facebook fan page changes is to see it as further integration with Facebook’s personal profiles. The changes in Facebook page layouts are a logical follow-up to similar changes to the design and layout of personal accounts on Facebook. With more integration, both sides benefit from a unified Facebook look and better usability across both platforms.

What Changes Have Taken Place?

There are four immediately noticeable changes to the layout of a Facebook page.

Wall. You now have more options on what your page wall displays. A new filter allows you to choose between showcasing top posts from fans, or stick to your own posts as a form of quality control. There’s also the recent posts option to keep the posts in chronological order, if you prefer it that way.

Navigation and Loss of Tabs. In its previous version, Facebook page’s navigation tabs are conveniently located at the top of your page wall. Now, however, these tabs are moved to the left column right under the page profile photo. This presents both a challenge and a benefit. For one, it takes some getting used to both for you and your fans. The size of your profile photo also becomes an important consideration, as you don’t want it to be too tall to dwarf and push down the little navigation section of tabs below it. But there are benefits as well, most notably the fact that you can now rename your tabs or page sections with longer names, whenever necessary.

New Photostrip. Replacing the prominent placement of your page tabs is the photostrip, a series of five photo thumbnails representing the last five photos that your page has uploaded or been tagged in. This mirrors the layout of Facebook personal accounts, and presents a nifty new way of extending your visual branding on your Facebook page.

Adoption of iFrames. By this time, iFrames are the only means of customizing page tabs or sections, as opposed to the previous common practice of using FBML apps to create custom tabs. Again, this presents an opportunity and a challenge. Full iFrame adoption means more creative room for content such as audio, video, Web forms and dynamic design for Facebook fan pages. But this platform isn’t going to host the content for you, and you’ll have to provide your server or hosting solution to carry the content and stream it on your custom tabs.

The Takeaway: The Facebook Redesign Allows More Opportunity for Creative and Customized Fan Pages

There have been many successful pages that infused new ways of using Facebook page layouts to achieve their social media engagement goals. One successful method of increasing page likes, in particular, takes advantage of iFrames to create a custom landing page or reveal tab that opens up for non-fans of the page. This reveal tab essentially introduces the page to non-fans and urges them to like it. In return, new fans can then access exclusive content, discounts, a free video, report, eBook or some other incentive.

Source by Gary O’ Brien

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