Your Ever-changing Facebook Precense

While Facebook’s new look has left many in the oil and gas industry in a scramble, migrating to the new, mandatory design change need not be accompanied by the gnashing of teeth. With just a bit of fore planning, you’ll be able to cruise through the upgrade—and perhaps dust a competitor or two—unphased.

Oil and gas companies doing some interesting things with the new design include Chevron, Hess and ConocoPhillips.

In the most fundamental terms, the Great Facebook Migration of 2012 represened a move by the digital hangout to standardize the look and feel of every Business Page on its network. Essentially, the online community wants every business on its site to be able to express what’s happening with its brand—as well as the heritage behind that brand—all on a single page.

For those who have not yet done so, getting from the old facebook format to the new one is fairly easy. Here are the guideposts:

*Get Acquainted With Your New Start Page: Probably one of the most far-reaching impacts of Facebook’s upgrade is that the design format of every business start page—or the page your visitors land on when they first visit you on Facebook—is now standardized.

Setting Up Your Facebook Page

Essentially, every business is now required to run a large banner image, also known as a cover photo, across the top of is start page. “The large cover photo alone presents a fantastic branding opportunity,” says Peter Lee, CEO, WireWalkersVA, a Web-design and marketing firm.

Below, you’ll be asked to work with a number of boxes, organized in a two-column format, which will showcase activity on your page. Some boxes will feature your activity —posts and announcements made by your company, for example. And other boxes will feature visitor activity—their posts, any “Likes” they’ve posted about your company, and similar activity.

*Use Care Selecting a Banner Image: Facebook sees the banner image as an opportunity for you to give visitors a feel for your brand. So it’s prohibiting businesses from using the giant image simply to sell stuff. In practice, that means you won’t be able to post an image with a “50% off” come-on, or populate the image with phrases like “limited time offer” or “2-for-1.”

*Create a Mandatory Timeline: If your business has a rich, interesting heritage, you’re in luck. With the Timeline
running down the extreme right margin of your page, you’ll be able to tell your business’ story in words and images. In practice, this will mean selecting a series of “Milestones” in your business’s history, which will appear as hotlinked dates stacked vertically on the right side of your start page.

*Pin Important News/Posts Up Top: A new feature, post-pinning enables your business to anchor a post near the very top of your start page for up to seven days.

*Hide/Delete Unwanted Posts: Warning—with the redesign, old unwanted posts may automatically be incorporated into your Timeline by Facebook. Fortunately, Facebook offers a tool that will enable you to hide or delete old posts that reflect badly on your business or simply need to be removed.

*Be Aware of ‟Visitor Graffiti”: One of the dicier elements of Facebook’s new start page is that it is so chillingly efficient at tracking what Facebook friends are saying about your company. For good or bad, all those opinions will show up in an activity box just below your banner photo. That activity box becomes mandatory with the new design—there’s no way to remove it from your page.

As you might imagine, the graffiti factor has hoards of businesses squirming both ways.

• Consider Private Messaging: As a kind of counter-balance to the graffiti factor, Facebook has introduced company/visitor private messaging with this latest upgrade. The feature enables your company to handle tricky customer service problems via private messages.
• Say Good-Bye to Custom Landing Pages: In another controversial move, the latest Facebook redesign no longer allows businesses to create custom landing pages. Every visitor who clicks to your Facebook presence is automatically routed to your start page. No exceptions.
• Check Out the New Admin Panel: Virtually every aspect of your Facebook presence can be managed and monitored from the new Admin Panel.
• Get More Help: There’s plenty of help available for companies looking to migrate to Facebook’s new look and feel at Facebook’s help center.

PHOTO CREDITS

1. A Facebook employee muses over the next step for the social networking revolution.
2. Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg says more than 900 million people use the social network on a monthly basis.