Facebook is rolling out an update to Facebook Pages which changes the layout to be more like the new Profile layout, along with other changes. Most importantly for marketers and businesses, it now allows brands to interact with people and other pages as your brand (before you could only comment as a person on other pages or profiles). This allows a little more separation between personal and professional brands, but also gives brands an opportunity to interact and communicate more widely throughout Facebook.
There are pluses and minuses to this change. As a person, you may want to be more careful what pages you “like” since they’ll now be able to comment on your own profile. It may be strange to see Nike commenting on your own wall, for example. As a brand, it allows a more wider interaction throughout Facebook, but it also removes a bit of the person-to-person communication which we had before. However, the reason for brands are so a company can have (some) control over their image and reputation. If someone was communicating on a brand’s behalf on Facebook, and they leave the company, the brand would have lost all of those connections before. Now companies have more control over their own network.
What do you think about the change? Are you for it or against it and why?
(photo by Andrew Feinberg, on Flickr)