New Opportunity with Facebook Templates

A New Template for Your Facebook Business Page

There has been recent buzz about the new template feature for business pages on Facebook, and we want to share our insight to help our clients and friends understand what’s going on. While we are still waiting for an official statement from Facebook to provide clarity on these templates, we decided to implement it ourselves to learn firsthand. We don’t have all the insight yet, but here is what we know.

The templates are designed to help businesses communicate more strategically with their fans and target audiences. Each template has elements that cater to the needs of different types of businesses. Currently, there are a few options you can customize on your business page, but these new templates are supposed to offer more, making Facebook a more flexible extension of your website.

Page managers currently have the option to switch to these new templates. On June 19, Facebook will automatically change nonprofit pages using the new template. But don’t worry, all companies will have the option to opt-out of these new templates or switch back to them if they want to do so.

Here is a list of the new template options Facebook has to offer:

• Standard
• Business
• Services
• Venues
• Nonprofit
• Politicians
• Restaurants and Cafes
• Shopping

 

Excited about this new feature, we switched The Fearey Group’s page from the standard template to the services template. With the services template, we now have the ability to list special “offers” as well as our “services” under new tabs in the left page menu. The rest of the tabs stayed the same. Here’s how to do it yourself.

Once you apply a new template, Facebook provides a brief explanation of the exact changes that will occur on your page before you proceed further. When the change is complete, we suggest taking the tour to get acquainted with the details of each new item.

Overall, Facebook’s templates are moving to act more like a website. Similar to the services tab, you can find a products tab on the business template where companies can set up a store directly on Facebook – like a website landing page with options for photos, videos, product title, price, description, URL, and the ability to make them “Featured” on Facebook.

When we started to add to our new list of services, we found there are some requirements worth noting:

1. Service Name – Limited to 40 characters max.
2. Price – Not required. It appears as a subhead to the title, so we used it to supplement the description instead of list a price.
3. Description – Limited to 200 characters. It will be difficult for professional service companies to stay brief.
4. Photo(s) – You can upload multiple photos, but note that each photo will be framed in a small square box.

Currently, we can see the changes on our site, but they don’t appear to be visible to the public yet. We suspect all changes will be pushed on Monday when the nonprofits change over, but we can only wait and see.

Additional New Facebook Features

There are a few updates occurring across the board for all Facebook business pages including new primary button options (a button that is featured at the top of the home page). For example, the new politician template offers a primary button that allows viewers to directly message the candidate. The restaurant and cafes template has a primary button that allows page visitors to call the business directly for reservations – an added convenience for smaller restaurants who don’t have a website at all.

The nonprofit template features buttons on the toolbar that allow page visitors to like, follow or create a fundraiser for the organization. The “create a fundraiser” button is game-changing for nonprofits on Facebook because it creates an in-app call-to-action where users can build a fundraiser and share it directly through Facebook to their friends, while still maintaining a connection to the organization.

While this fundraiser feature has been available to select organizations for some time through beta testing, it is now being rolled out to all nonprofits.

This is especially exciting because now nonprofits can have community members coordinate fundraisers directly through the organization’s Facebook page making it easier to link and share the fundraiser, which will hopefully spark more community engagement and take some of the work off the nonprofit’s themselves. We looking forward to trying this out with our nonprofit clients in the Pacific Northwest.

Two other new Facebook features we highly recommend page managers take advantage of are:

• Cover Videos – Now your cover photo can be a 20-90 second video! Organizations can feature a more in-depth, viewer friendly visual audio/experience on their page.
• Comment with a GIF – Users can select the GIF option in the comment box and use trending GIFs or search for the type of GIF they want to use. GIFs tend to increase interaction on posts because they are entertaining and provide a different way to communicate. GIF usage has gone up increasingly in 2017, due to high levels of social media use and millennials in the workplace.

What does this mean for us?

First, we are excited to see how this works in practice. We hope to see a positive experience from our nonprofit clients who end up utilizing the new template.

Second, we are looking forward to seeing how effective the more “website-looking” services page is, as well as how people react and engage with it.

 

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Interested in more social media insight? Check out our previous blog post on Social Media Strategy.