The New Style Facebook Pages - How to use for Restaurants, Pubs and Hotels

On Thursday 10th February 2011 Facebook launched their new Pages layout. 
Restaurants, Pubs, Hotels and Local food business will benefit from the new style Facebook Pages but after speaking to a few Restaurant owners and Page Administrators over the weekend it seems there is some confusion and no time to learn the new Page set up.

Over the next couple of weeks I will be covering best practices in preparation for the migration to the new page layout on the 1st March.


This is the first in a series of posts - 
The New Style Facebook Pages - How to use for Restaurants, Pubs and Hotels
- Covering the new layout

Here is the link to the new Facebook for Pages manual. It explains how to use Pages but it's not that clear or detailed so I'll go over the main changes today and follow on with how you can benefit as a restaurant, pub or hotel using these benefits in later posts.


New Layout

Facebook launches a major re-design and expansion of functionality of its Pages for businesses, brands, media, and public figures which includes Pubs Restaurants and Hotels. 

Navigation and Tabs

The Page layout will now match the December user profile redesign with a left-hand navigation menu replacing the tabs above the wall. As tabs are no longer front-and-center, the redesign could reduce the frequency with which users visits tabs other than the default landing tab.

      

Photo Strip

Similar to the redesigned user profile, Pages have a Photostrip above the wall that displays the latest photos the Page has tagged itself in. However, the five thumbnails appear in a different order upon each reload. The profile picture is slightly reduced in size from 200 x 600 pixels to 180 x 540. The About blurb has moved from the wall tab to the info tab.

Mutual Friends and Interests
Users will also see a mutual friends and interests panel on the top right displaying the friends who also Like the Page, and the Likes the user and the Page have in common. 


You can now post as "you"
When logged in as yourself you can now comment on your business page and update your status as you, not just as your page.


Pages can Like other Pages
"Likes". Pages will have the option to Like other Pages, not just favorite them, and feature them on their own page. When logged in as your page you will also be able to post on other pages walls as your page and see their updates in your page's news feed. 


“Page Owners”. Links and profile pics of these Likes and admins can be made visible below the navigation menu and reordered through the new “Featured” section of the Edit Page admin interface.

Notifications and Email alerts

Page admins, when logged in as their Page, from the Account drop-down menu in the top right corner of Facebook will give them access to Facebook and email notifications about activity on their Page, and other options.

Facebook admins can now turn on email notifications to alert them to activity on their Page through the “Your Settings” tab of the Edit Page admin interface.

Wall posts - re-ordered

Page admins can select between an “Everyone” and a "Page posts only" default tab for the wall. Instead of showing a reverse chronological stream of posts, the Everyone tab shows users posts Facebook thinks will be the most relevant. Recent posts by fans and posts that have received a lot of Likes and comments will bubble to the top. You can change to Page posts only which will be in a more chronological order but I feel we should be allowing posts from our fans to be shown, after all Facebook should be a two way conversation!

There are more tips and tricks with the new Page set up which I'll share with you too a bit at a time so you can get used to them rather than all in one go. You may have already figured some of them out :)

Please feel free to comment or ask any questions you may have either here on the blog or on my Facebook Page