New Updates Announced for Facebook Business Pages

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By: Erin 

Facebook just unveiled a few important Page updates for local businesses. The features will help businesses better reach and inform consumers. However, it’s important for businesses to understand the implications of these updates in order to manage the changes.

The main update is the new “Recommendations” feature to Pages. This tool allows users to post a review of your business alongside photos and related business tags. While users already have the ability to leave reviews, Recommendations need to be at least 25 characters long and allow users to include new tags. Tags work similarly to hashtags - they allow the user to post keywords and phrases with the review to make it easier to understand and have better searchability.

The one downside of Recommendations for businesses? Recommendations open the door for competitors to post fake reviews and false keywords.  Business owners can combat this by regularly monitoring Recommendations and reporting any fraudulent, paid for or spam Recommendations to Facebook.

Another noteworthy feature is the ability to include a “prominently featured set of action buttons on Pages”. Aimed at optimizing user experience on a mobile device, buttons will allow users to complete key actions with minimal clicks. These include actions such as booking an appointment or sending a message directly from the page feed. While Pages have had a CTA button available previously this feature will allow Pages to include expanded actions at the top of their feed. The available buttons are based on the Page template. 

A few other features Facebook is rolling out to Pages include:

  • Stories: The ability to view Stories by clicking on the Page’s profile photo. The goal of this feature is to encourage businesses to more heavily use Facebook Story capabilities.
  • Expanded Product/Service Listings: Businesses can better share information such as price range and menu offerings on their pages.
  • Ticketing Integration: For businesses promoting events, Pages will now have more robust ticketing integrations.
  • Expanding Job Listing: Job listings will be available globally over the next few months. This feature launched in North America and has expanded limitedly until this update.

Facebook can be a powerful tool for local business owners, but it is important to stay up to date with new features. By understanding the updates to Pages businesses can better manage and take advantage of all Facebook has to offer.

Monica Hickey