14 DAY TRIAL // Facebook has rolled out a brand new design for Pages along with several big new features. Facebook Pages now look and feel like the regular profile pages that got updated last year. A very interesting new feature is the possibility to log in as your page, leaving comments or even liking other pages using your page identity rather than your own.
There is even a News Feed for your page now. Along with the redesign, Facebook introduced better tools to surface relevant comments and moderate spammy ones.
"We are excited to introduce major improvements to Pages. These new features will help you manage communication, express yourself, and increase engagement," Facebook announced.
For regular users, the big change is the new design. Facebook Pages now borrow from the regular profiles, tabs are gone - moved to the left - and there is a string of photos at the very top of the page.
It's a cleaner design that has proven popular for user profiles, so there probably won't be that many people complaining this time around.
Admins can choose to upgrade to the new design and even preview the pages before applying the change. However, come March 10 and the redesign becomes mandatory.
Apart from the new look, there is new functionality as well. Admins can now browse the site as their Page. It may sound confusing, but it makes a lot of sense. They can leave comments on other pages, even 'like' them, while maintaining their 'official' identity.
While logged in as a Page, you also get a News Feed for it which displays the latest updates, comments and activity around the page.
Facebook has finally gotten around fixing comments for Pages. There is now a way of displaying comments sorted by relevancy rather than in the order they came in. Especially for large pages, this should make that section a lot more useful.
There are also better tools for moderation. Admins can create a list of words or phrases they don't want to get on their pages and any comment containing the words will be marked as spam.
There are more changes under the hood, Facebook explained how Pages can now use iframes for tabs along with the existing option of using the Facebook Markup Language.