First of all if you are a facebook user with personal profile then this won’t interest you much.  This blog article is mainly for facebook page admins.   But you may wish to continue to read it as it is incredibly interesting. Yesterday Facebook quietly announced upgrade for Facebook pages via a note on their official page for Facebook Pages . If you are an admin of any facebook page then you can preview / upgrade to new page from here.  If you do not wish to upgrade now then automatically facebook will upgrade your page by March 11, 2011.

I took preview myself and captured some screenshots that will give you a good idea what these changes will mean to you as Facebook page admin.

CHANGE # 1

Just like your personal profile photos can be showcased on the top of the page.  You can showcase the photos that you upload on your wall or tag your page to here. The photos uploaded by people who like you page cannot be showcased here. And just like your personal profile you can click on “x” and hide the photo that you do not wish to showcase.

CHANGE # 2

Navigation is on the left – Info , Photos , apps ( earlier used to be on tabs ) etc.

CHANGE # 3

Admins can now show the top post on the page wall to their likers ( fans ) of the page .  This feature is great to promote a message, deal, event etc.  The drawback is if you opt for ‘top post’ to show then you will miss the advantage of showing chronology on info shared on the page.

CHANGE # 4 Use facebook as a page

Use Facebook as YOUR PAGE .  This is kind of having an AVATAR.  This is incredible feature for business owners.  Now you can switch your personal profile to your page profile and start interacting with other pages as your own page. THIS IS REAL FUN. Whenever you wish you can switch back to your own profile and use facebook as you and not your page.  This in other words mean one can be a business , interact with other businesses ( pages ) as business and continue to be self while interacting with friends or for unofficial conversations.

Why facebook allowed interaction only with pages while using ‘Facebook as a Page’ is could be because facebook wants to make sure that page admins are still paying for ads to promote page to users.  Another reason could be to control spam. But I see spam could increase because I can be a page called ‘ JB is cutie pie ‘ and I can go on putting spam on pages. [ this sucks but we know such pages exist] Note : FB spam filter on pages is Good so life for such spam pages will be very less.

But pages interacting with pages means a whole new “official” world for facebook users. I would like to call is as LinkedIn part of Facebook.

How to Switch to a Page Avatar

Switch to Page Profile and Activate Notifications when fans interact with your page or post

Step-1

Click on your account on top right hand as seen in image below

Step 2

Choose which page you would want to use facebook as (in other words choose your Avatar ) by clicking on switch.

Step-3

You will get the confirmation as seen in image below

What all you can do when using facebook as Page

• Receive Notifications when people interact with your page or post

• You can search here to find more pages on facebook to like them or to comment on them

• Like the Page as Page

• See newsfeed just for the pages you have liked

NOTE: In case you wish to go back to your personal profile. Just switch it back as indicated in image below

How to Edit Page Settings

Next step is to click on “Your Settings” and then check the second box as seen below

I also saw an alert to link my Twitter profile with Facebook page.

Note for developers – starting March 11^th use of static FBML in tabs of the page would be stopped. You can use only the iframes.  Facebook is recommending to start migrating to iframes already.  Facebook introduced iframe tabs for pages. This is primarily done to support apps running on HTML5 . Facebook is suggesting all developers to start migrating to iframe tabs. By March 11th 2011 no more static FBML tabs would be possible , however tabs created before March 11th will continue to be supported by FB. FB is recommending to discontinue using fbml and start using iframe as eventually entire FB platform will be made HTML5 compatible. here are more details if you want to readhttp://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/462