So, I’ve got a bone to pick with Zuckerberg and his team of book faces. I know that “change is good” and all that jazz, but all the recent mini changes that have been popping up everywhere throughout the popular and thriving social network are making me want to gouge my eyes out with a spork.

For instance, their new photo viewer is probably the worst thing they’ve implemented over the past 7 years of their life. The black background is hideous, the photos don’t load properly, scrolling down is a nightmare, and comments are sometimes nowhere to be found below the photo (in my own experience).

Sigh. (And sorry for the short rant.)

Anyway, my intention for this post wasn’t exactly to rant about how dysfunctional the new Facebook photo viewer is. Instead, I want to talk about something much more important. On February 10^th 2011, team Facebook made some pretty big changes to their fan pages.

To be more specific, Facebook gave fan pages similar functionality to personal profiles.

I Hope You Have A Facebook Page For Your Business

Whether or not you believe in Facebook promotion, I firmly believe that having a Facebook fan page for your business is crucial for keeping your customers, readers, or audience up to date on things.

Even if Facebook isn’t really your cup of tea, other Facebook addicts will gladly drink it up by the gallon. Personally, the most immediate traffic I receive comes from Facebook first, which usually happens after I post a link to my latest blog post.

Some people won’t subscribe to your RSS feed. Others won’t opt-in to your email list. But certain individuals WILL like your fan page. Give those people that option. Let them connect to you the way they want to connect with you.

Facebook Page Changes Are Now Presenting You With The Opportunity To Better Communicate Your Brand

A whole bunch of random changes have occurred with the new page features, and you probably know this already if you have your own page and took the virtual tour that Facebook told you to take before you upgraded to the new page layout. Having said that, there was something new I realized that just really stuck out to me.

With the newly revamped Facebook page layout, I discovered that you can actually POST on other pages using your own page, rather than just your individual profile. In other words, you can spread your brand.

Big deal? I think it is.

Before this change, you could never use your own page to post, comment, or share information. You could ONLY use your own personal profile. Now you have the chance to spread the word about your business and every single Facebook fan page owner would be missing out on new traffic if they didn’t take this into consideration.

Although you can’t use your own page to post on personal profiles as of these recent changes, you can most definitely post to any fan page you want.

How To Spread The Word About Your Brand On Facebook

Before you hop on over to Facebook and start blasting comments and links on other pages, make sure you take these few tips into consideration:

Contribute To Similar & Relevant Pages. This is a no-brainer. Find other fan pages that are on par with your topic or industry and start commenting. Remember that quality comments will go a long way over short and useless comments. Generally, you should treat it like blog commenting—but for Facebook.

Don’t Spam. I have a feeling this will be a problem with these new Facebook page changes. There’s already a lot of spam that Facebook pages deal with, and now that users can willingly post as their own page, I expect this to only get worse. If you provide weak comments and do it too often, you could risk being blocked by certain page owners. Keep it relevant and don’t overdo it with too many comments.

Pay Attention To The Big Dawgs. Of course, we all know that there are a good bunch of Facebook pages that have thousands, or even millions of fans. That’s huge. You should be paying close attention those big dawgs in your niche and contributing smartly and where necessary.

Give A Little Facebook Page Liking Love. Your own page can actually now “like” other pages and display them on your page to your fans. It’s kind of like a blogroll with a new twist to it, and it’s great if you can team up with other page owners and agree to like each other’s pages. But with that said, you need to be careful that you don’t go nuts with liking too many other pages since posts from pages you like can now appear in your page feeds, and that can add a lot of clutter for your fans.

Don’t Get Too Caught Up In Page Promotion. Sometimes, we can get so distracted with promotion that it becomes all too easy to neglect our own page. Make sure you contribute to your own page by answering comments and updating where necessary. This is especially easier now with the recent changes since Facebook activated notifications for when fans post on your page wall. You have no excuse to neglect your own wall.

Bring Your Brand To Life On Facebook… “Out Of The Box” Style

Now that Facebook pages look and function a lot like personal profiles, there are a lot of fun things we can do with their layouts. Back when the changes were made to personal profiles and we all noticed that strange band of tagged photos across our profiles at the top, Alexander Oulin decided to take the opportunity to utilize this option and transform it into a work of art.

Clearly impressed and inspired, I copied his gorgeous idea and applied it to my own profile. The photo you see below is a screen cap of my own face on my personal Facebook profile that I created a while ago. I got tired of it after about a week and then took it down.

Since then, services like FBanners.com have popped up so you can create or use an existing combination of photos to make your own cool looking banner across the top of your profile.

Now that this photo banner display area has also been implemented for Facebook pages, I expect that quite a few businesses will begin to create their own unique photo banners to help brand their businesses and make their Facebook pages look more aesthetically pleasing.

I know I plan on doing it sometime soon for my own page.

So, How ‘Bout It?

What do you think of Facebook’s recent changes? (Any of them?)
Do you have a Facebook fan page?
Do you plan on taking advantage of the recent changes?