I don’t know if it’s just me, but I’m having some issues with the new Facebook Pages upgrade. While the upgrade offers some noteworthy improvements, I have found some deep gaps in usability for admins. Am I missing something? So, I explored and poked around, and after about ten days of using Facebook’s new upgrade on my page, here’s what I see:

The Good:

• Photos listed along the top only show what you want to show. This means your business page will not show images posted or tagged by your fans or friends. This enhancement improves the selection of visuals which are unique to your business and maintains the integrity of your business page and your brand.

• The new navigation bar at left is, of course, a plus. Consistency should be a priority in any website, whether it be Facebook or the tiny freelancer site. The left hand navigation now corresponds to Facebook’s profile setup. Everything in place.

• Get notifications when fans interact with your page. This is wonderful!! When someone comments on your page, Facebook notifies you. Also, when someone new “likes” your page, you get notified in a similar way that you’d get a new friend request on your profile. However, you have to be using Facebook in page mode to see this. Notifications will also come to you in your email. I have not, however, received notifications via email despite having that option selected. As a note here, until this is sorted out, I still prefer HyperAlerts for my page updates.

• Use Facebook as your business page rather than your personal profile. Also nice. Now you can go forth into Facebookland using your business identity. But you can’t visit or interact with friends, only pages, and herein lies my beef.

The Bad:

• Can’t tag or interact with friends or personal profiles. When using Facebook as my page, I can not tag my friends nor can I interact with them unless they have directly commented on one of my page posts. My question here is how does Facebook think you can run a business or use Facebook page mode effectively without interacting with actual people? Additionally, my friends do not appear in my page’s news feed. Only the pages I’ve liked will appear in my news feed. Now maybe this isn’t a big deal, but when in page mode I miss my friends. Some of them offer great content I’d like to share and some of these people aren’t necessarily friends but actual business associates with whom I’d like to network. Doesn’t matter . . . I can’t interact with people when in page mode. Here’s where it gets most problematic: what if I have a friend with a business and I want to post something like “Check out Sally Smith’s new photos at AIGA Connecticut”.  If I’ve “liked” the page AIGA Connecticut, it can be tagged just as you’d expect. But what if I want to give some Facebook love to my friend Sally? Can’t do it.

• Here’s another puzzlement. When creating a photo album in my business page I can’t tag people there either. For instance, when I created a photo album in my page and wanted to tag my editor so he could see my new photos for our upcoming spread, I couldn’t do it because . . . Well Facebook page mode forces me to ignore people. BUT ok, here’s the work-around for that . . . I can switch back to “Use Facebook as Lisa” (personal profile)  and then tag people in the photo album I just created in my page. Whaaaat? Again, lots of switching going on here folks.

• In order to “switch” over to my business page from my profile, I have to access this option by clicking the “account” button at the top right of my screen. Then I have to click “Use Facebook as Page”.  Then because I am an admin for about 7 pages, I have to select which page I want to switch too. Each time I do this switcheroo, I must choose MY business page, which because pages are listed alphabetically, always falls at the very bottom of the pop-up window. This means I have to scroll to the bottom of the pop-up window to find my own page. Frustrating when you do this a couple of times a day, and in order to interact fully with people, I must switch several times a day. Also, the following image is a screen grab from my page which allows me to quickly switch back to my profile mode. Why is this not offered on my profile?

• Favorite pages have disappeared . . . or have they? A long time ago, I “liked” about 200 pages. On many of these I specified that they also be added to my business page. When Facebook rolled out the page upgrade, it stripped away all my page favorites previously added to my business page. In order to see anything in my page mode news feed, I had to go back and re-like all those pages. This is interesting considering the emphasis Facebook puts on pages with the upgrade. *sigh*

• If I add a link from MY Facebook personal profile to my own page (ie: a link to one of my profile photo albums), I don’t see it listed on my wall while I’m in page mode. If I then switch back to “View Facebook as Lisa” (my personal profile) the links are visually there. This means people visiting my page will see those links but not me. I find it confusing not to be able to view everything I’ve posted especially because the links in question are links from my Facebook profile. One would think there would be some kind of interface here? I discovered this because I wanted to share some of the photo albums from my profile with my business fans but when in page mode, but I can’t see the links in page mode. External links (from my blog, other websites etc) seem to appear to me and everyone else while in page mode.

There you have it. I hope this hasn’t confused you more than it helped you. Feature changes and page enhancements will go into effect for all Facebook pages on March 10th. What do you think of the new page upgrade?

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