Well, it’s happened again: Facebook has gone ahead and switched things up on us. I’m sure you’ve all seen the recent updates to the personal profiles, but what some of you might be overlooking are the upcoming changes to business pages. These changes will be much more subtle than the ones made on the personal profile, but they’re still important to know! Facebook is getting rid of the some of the extraneous features on their business pages in order to make the use of your marketing time more efficient and user-friendly.
As real estate virtual assistants, we think that it’s incredibly important to pay close attention every time we log into Facebook. The social networking site has a way of subtly adding special announcements regarding their upcoming changes to both business pages and personal profiles. We keep an eye out for these changes in order to stay ahead of the social media curve and figure out the ways that we can implement the new features for our clients. That’s why, when we logged in to Facebook and saw these recent announcements, we immediately thought we’d let you all know! Here are the two major changes coming to Facebook pages, effective October 31st:
You can’t import your blog using the Facebook Notes feature anymore. We secretly think this is a blessing in disguise. While it was very convenient for Facebook to allow our clients to import their blog through the Notes application, the feed was very unreliable. It would consistently break for long periods to time, leaving our clients manually posting each blog to their page. It also stopped supporting certain embedded video and iFrame codes, which left the feed looking broken and unprofessional. The posts wouldn’t come through correctly when the code in each post wasn’t incredibly basic. Facebook, realizing the flaws of their feed feature, is eliminating it, but not to worry. There are several third-party applications that you can use to effectively feed your blog to Facebook. We recommend HootSuite’s RSS feed feature or Twitterfeed. Both are easy to set up and reliable, so you can insure that your content is getting seen on a regular basis.
Bye-bye, Discussion tab. The Discussions tab, which was supposed to be a place where people could go to have conversations on your page, is getting removed at the end of the month. The reason why is that instead of going to the Discussions tab, people are participating in conversations directly on the Facebook wall, using Comments. This is a more subtle change, and one that will rid your page of what many think to be an “unnecessary” feature.
These changes might seem small, but they’re important to know in order to utilize your Facebook Business Page as efficiently and professionally as possible. If you have any questions about how you can use Facebook to enhance your business, or are interested in creating and building a social networking presence, don’t hesitate to contact your real estate virtual assistants! We’d love to help!
See You on Facebook!
Sarah Kay
Social Media and Copywriting Team Leader
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