3 Things You Should Know About the New Facebook Page Experience

You may have seen earlier this year that Meta announced a new Pages experience for nonprofits. If you missed it would be worth reading through the whole announcement, there are a fair amount of changes listed there, and we’re only going to highlight 3 items. 

If you’ve been following Meta (Facebook) for a while you may remember that Mark Zuckerberg released his Manifesto about building a global community all the way back in 2017, shortly after the organic reach of pages dropped to a fraction of what it previously was if favor of giving visibility to groups within the user’s newsfeed. This change left a lot of ministries scrambling to recapture their reach and impact on the Social Media platform. Since then, the most impactful changes we’ve seen from the platform have all been in the stated spirit of building a more robust community. It’s through that lens that we view updates and this release talks a lot about building better communities.

1. Dedicated News Feed:

The dedicated news feed is designed to allow you to “find and engage in conversations more easily”. Which is great news when it comes to interacting as a brand rather than an individual. However, the most interesting piece is that comments from nonprofits will be given priority. 

From the announcement:

“To make Page conversations more visible to a wider audience and to help them surface more frequently in their followers’ News Feed, comments from nonprofits will be bumped to the top of the comments section. People will also be able to follow Pages directly from comments and recommendations posts.” 

2. Focus on Followers:

People have historically been able to either “like” your page or “follow” your page. However, only followers were likely to see your content in their feed. The new experience removes likes altogether and focuses exclusively on followers. Again the emphasis is to focus only on the most engaged users and give more exposure to page content. 

3. Actionable Insights:

The actionable insights section gives generally vague information about this update “Get a quick overview of how your Page and Posts are performing with insights about your audience…” The one area they give details is around comments and conversations:

“New insights on comments can help you understand the value of engaging in conversations on your posts. “

As Meta continues to focus on building a robust global community it is exciting to see that some of their changes will help drive organic reach and engagement through your pages. It’s important to note that the focus of this reach is by driving more conversations through the comments, so if you don’t have a strategy for engaging with commenters it’s time to get testing.