New from Facebook – change the name of your page

Over the past few days Facebook have made a few changes to their pages that we thought we’d share with you here. Facebook pages are constantly changing and it can be hard to keep up with all the additions they make. The recent changes won’t make much difference to fans of a page, but are aimed at admins to make managing pages easier and more efficient. When Facebook make any changes to the page system it usually results in criticism from page admins but these most recent changes have been well received and consistently prove Facebook’s dedication to making life as easy as possible for brands that manage a presence on Facebook. So what are the most recent changes that they’ve made?

A new look to manage your page

Facebook have completely overhauled the admin section where you manage pages. Where this was previously all done through one interface, they’ve now introduced new sidebar links that allow you to manage different sections :

Though it does take a while to get used to the new interface and find all the features you accessed before, this is a much nicer way of managing your pages, as previously it could be difficult to find certain features such as sending an update to fans. This is now nicely contained within the marketing section, where you can also see the other free and paid promotional options available, including advertising and a free Like box.

Change the name of pages

This is another new option available through the new page interface, but it doesn’t seem to be available to all pages. This is certainly a much called-for feature and it’s one of the most common problems a business has with their Facebook page. If you change the name of your organisation for example, you previously had to go through an account manager at Facebook and request that the name be changed. Many are seeing the option to change the name of their page themselves, though it’s not available for all. On the Simply Zesty page we have over 10,000 fans but don’t see this option and discussion seems to point to the option only being available to pages with a few Likes. This makes sense as it protects larger communities who have joined a page for one thing – say an event – before it changes to a generic brand name, or to prevent the sale of Facebook pages who have a large community.

If you are lucky enough to be able to change the name of your page, you’ll see it in the ‘Basic information’ tab. The image below shows this (screenshot taken from a page with a personal name, not a profile) :

New spam filter

If you’re an admin of a large page you’ll know the effort involved in constantly monitoring the wall for spam, as these are increasingly targeted to post spam links. Facebook have now addressed this by introducing a new spam filter. This is seen in the options along the top, only by admins of the page, where you select to see just posts by the page, or by ‘others’ as well :

This prevents your fans from seeing the spam content, and clicking into this tab allows you to see all the spam content, and hovering over a post gives you the option to delete it :

Hovering over the ‘x’ at the side of a post will also give you the option to unmark a post as spam, so the page admin has full control over the content. It’s only been live for a few days but as yet I haven’t seen a post incorrectly marked as spam so it seems that their content filtering system is fairly robust.

This recent batch of changes from Facebook seem absolutely spot on and make managing pages much easier. The spam filter is well overdue and will have page admins all over rejoicing!