Picture 1131 300x237 5 ways the new Facebook Pages can benefit your businessLast week brought a whole new set of Facebook page changes which we covered in some depth but there is another angle that we’ve been thinking about that didn’t occur to us at first and that is business networking. The biggest change of all for me was the fact that you could log in as a business and take the profile of the business around Facebook rather than using your own personal profile and although this seems like a minor change I think it will have far reaching consequences. There is no doubt that Facebook has put a lot of thought in to how people will use the new Facebook business pages and as we always see people will start finding their own uses for their business as time goes on…

Business Networking?

The fact that you can log in as a business rather than a personal profile is a huge step forward and one that opens a whole host of new networking opportunities. Up until now you had to work within the confines of your own page but now you take you business identity all over Facebook and the web in general. You can like things, comment on other pages and engage in entirely new ways. This change should not be underestimated because the networking potential of commenting on other pages and actively engaging with users away from your own business page is huge. The important thing to remember here is that every time you engage somewhere it will leave a link back to your own page so very much like commenting is a good strategy for growing blog traffic the same now applies to Facebook.

Screen shot 2011 02 11 at 09.54.10 5 ways the new Facebook Pages can benefit your business
* You obviously wouldn’t do it like I have in this example but it shows that you can talk business to business now

Lead Generation?

You never really knew up until now who was running Facebook pages. It could have been somebody from an agency, the brand manager or just an intern. There was no simple way to contact business owners and the page was pretty much a broadcast tool unless you wanted to leave a public comment on the wall. With the new settings it will be far easier to get in touch with business owners or people who run the pages so this could become a great lead generation tool as many businesses now have a Facebook presence of some sort.

Screen shot 2011 02 11 at 10.05.56 5 ways the new Facebook Pages can benefit your business

Improved Customer Service

Plenty of brands have been using Facebook as a customer service tool already but they’ve been doing so in a very constricted way because of the structure of the old pages. Page owners couldn’t even get notifications about new comments or engagement but that has all changed now that you can log in as your business. Twitter has been a far better customer service tool to date but these changes make Facebook more “real time” for page admins. Add in the fact that you can see who is in charge of the page now and Facebook just became a far better customer service tool than it was yesterday.

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Products And Services

Facebook is rigid in the way that it is built and what you can do design wise but the new photo lay out is tailor made for products, services and innovative ways of displaying. Much the same way as images were hacked on personal profiles to do cool stuff the same will be happening on business pages as we speak. A great place to show off your latest campaigns or do something innovative with photoshop me thinks!
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Commenting on 3rd Party Sites

The new commenting system that Facebook is rumored to be rolling out in the next couple of weeks could make things even more interesting again. Imagine taking your business identity all over the web and leaving comments that all lead back to your business page. At the moment Facebook doesn’t allow you to do this as you can see from the screen grab below but I’d be stunned if this didn’t arrive in the future. This could be for people who either want to promote their pages or build themselves in to the experts in their field the ability to leave comments around the web. The other angle is integrating Facebook comments in to your own site when they launch and being able to use your Facebook profile to answer everything and have a seamless experience.

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