Need help navigating all of the updates coming from Facebook’s New Page Experience on your dealership’s Business Page? Check out our comprehensive guide and see what changes you need to make BEFORE and AFTER your Facebook Business Page makes the switch from Classic Page Experience to the New Page Experience.
Change is Gonna Come
In today’s world, Facebook is an invaluable tool for your business. The social platform allows you to share information, show off products, engage with existing and potential customers easily, and so much more – all for free.
Pair that with its cost-effective ads platform that reaches the site’s nearly 2 billion daily users, and it’s easy to see why you can’t ignore this tech behemoth. But, just because it’s been the biggest player in the game for over a decade, doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its fair share of issues.
Get ready to meet the newest one: Facebook’s New Page Experience!
As the great Sam Cooke once crooned, “Change is gonna come…” But that doesn’t always mean we’re going to like it. So let’s pop the hood and take a look, shall we?
What is the New Page Experience (NPE) on Facebook?
The New Page Experience (or NPE for short), is Meta’s latest headache – I mean innovation! – in the business world. It’s a fully revamped look of the front-facing business page on their Facebook platform, designed to be “cleaner and more intuitive” and to allow for “easy switching and navigation between a public-facing Page and an individual profile”.
While that’s all good and well in theory, in reality, it seems the NPE is a potential PR nightmare waiting to happen if you’ve got folks with access to the page who aren’t aware of the update.
This New Page Experience allows you to interact as your page in a way that’s almost identical to a personal profile, and when you “switch now” to one of these NPE pages, you will continue to interact as the page until you force Facebook to switch you back to your personal profile.
Are you seeing how this has the potential to get really bad really quickly? Yeah, us too.
Don’t want to deal with this yourself? No need to worry – take advantage of Dealer Authority’s social media solutions so our team of strategists can battle Meta on a daily basis for you!
What has changed from the Classic Page Experience to the New?
Aesthetic Updates
Obviously, with a New Page Experience comes a new page look!
The aesthetic of the NPE is more modern and fresh than the Classic Pages, with much less clutter filling up the left side panel of the page.
One of the first changes you’ll notice when you go to interact as your business page for the first time on the New Page Experience is the updated left panel navigation menu.
It’s got a sleek new look and has removed some unnecessary buttons.
With this more minimal look comes more minimal details – the large “About” and “Additional information” sections that were housed on your main post feed in the Classic Pages have been reduced to one short little bio section to give Facebook users a tweet-sized taste of what your brand is all about.
The new, compact “Intro” section has all of your dealership’s pertinent info housed alongside the main post feed, including:
- your address
- phone number
- website link
- hours
- price range
- average customer rating
It also offers the ability to add details like if you offer free wifi or diversity details you’d like to have highlighted.
This is undoubtedly a refreshing update compared to the clunky, over-full About section on the Classic Pages.
All of the details in the NPE’s sleek new bio section were housed there, plus those big “About” and “Additional information” sections.
Additionally, your like and follower count, check-in count, and email address lived there, as well as room for more details if you want to add them. Yuck!
Facebook Business Page Menu Bar Updates and How to Edit Them
Although the home page of your NPE is noticeably cleaner and more streamlined, the menu bar between your profile photo and post section has gotten unnecessarily overwhelming.
For some reason, Meta has decided that they should transfer over all of the same details you can put on your personal profile into your business page, all nested into the menu bar. There are now sections added on your NPE business page to highlight your business’s favorite music, sports, movies, TV shows, and books.
Under the “About” tab, in addition to useful details like what services you offer or which languages your team speaks, this section now invites you to add religious views, political views, “who you’re interested in”, and gender to your business page.
Sure, we can all think of business examples where these details are core to their mission (we all know Chick-Fil-A immediately comes to mind), but for the vast majority of businesses, especially car dealers, this is information that your page absolutely does not need.
Thankfully, you can remove many of these with the “Manage sections” option, conveniently hidden in an easy-to-miss spot that you have to scroll to the very bottom of the myriad of options under the More section to find.
Functionality Updates
On top of the aesthetic changes, the NPE has several functionality changes as well.
In another similarity to the personal profile experience, Facebook’s New Page Experience gives you a separate page feed when you login as your page that functions in the same way as your main personal feed, but now you’re interacting as your business.
This feed will show you updates from other pages that your page follows, as well as “suggested for you” content – literally exactly like your personal feed.
Switching Between Meta Business Page Profiles and Personal Profiles
And this brings us back to the “easy switching and navigation between a public-facing Page and an individual profile” that Meta promised us.
To switch between your personal profile and the page(s) you manage, simply tap the profile pic icon in the top right corner, then tap the profile icon with the grey semi-circles around it.
If you manage multiple pages and are wanting to switch to a different page than the circled image, simply tap “See all profiles” and it will bring up all of the pages you have access to so you can select which you’d like to interact as.
Sounds a little too convenient?
Don’t worry – Facebook has kept it frustrating by not giving you the ability to search through the pages you have access to with a search bar, but instead forcing you to scroll through EVERY page until you find the one you want.
Oh yeah, and every time you go to the “see all profiles” it will list all of your pages in random order with seemingly no rhyme or reason as to which show up first for you. Fun, right?
Are you interacting as you or a Business Page? With NPE it can be tough to tell.
Other than potentially having to scroll through a ton of pages to find the one you want, yes, it is easy to switch between the two.
But it’s even easier not to realize you were most recently interacting as your page, which causes tremendously potential issues the next time you hop into the app.
Imagine this: you open up your Facebook to mindlessly scroll after dinner with a glass of wine in hand, and then after you’ve added your two cents to a few random posts you came across: you realize you’ve left those comments as your business, not as you.
The horror.
We cannot stress this enough – you need to triple-check that you are interacting as the page you want to interact as before you do anything on Facebook, from likes to comments to leaving reviews.
And equally (if not more) important: you need to go through your business settings ASAP and ensure that you don’t have any random people who have access to interact as your page.
Make sure those who have access are current employees who you trust and who logically should have access to the page.
Sure, you trust your finance manager to crunch the numbers properly, and you trust your service manager to ensure your techs are the best of the best but do they REALLY need to have access to interact as your business?
Figure that out, then weed out the unnecessary folks to minimize your potential for accidental interactions to arise.
Wave Goodbye to your Page Likes
The time has finally come that likes are going away. Not on posts, though: page likes are supposedly disappearing with the NPE. Meta has determined that the followers of your Facebook page are a better gauge for who is actually engaging with your account, so they claim they’re doing away with page likes entirely.
The execution of this update means that folks who BOTH like and follow your page will remain followers, but if they only like the Classic Page, you will need to invite them again once the NPE switch goes into effect.
However, at this point, ALL of the pages we manage that have switched to the New Page Experience still show both likes and followers, so this may be an end goal that we will see with these pages further down the line.
Major Do’s and Don’ts for Facebook’s New Page Experience
What you should NOT do
Sure, usually you’d see what you should do first when big changes are happening.
But once your page has switched over to the NPE, it’s crucial for you to NOT do something if you want to protect the content on your page. What is that, you ask?
Do NOT switch back to the Classic Page Experience!
Yes, it’s a familiar safe space you’ve grown accustomed to over the years, but if you switch back, EVERYTHING that was posted while the page was on the New Page Experience will disappear – forever.
What you SHOULD do
Now that you’ve unwillingly succumbed to the pressure of Meta’s ever-changing platform, it’s time to focus on what you SHOULD do with your new page.
First things first – check your page bio. The NPE allows for a shockingly smaller amount of characters. Seriously, you get 101 characters. THAT’S IT!
Next, you want to head over to the “About” tab and check that all of your pertinent details are all still there and accurate.
Everything that was in your contact info on the Classic Page should transfer over, but it would simply make too much sense for everything to go as it should when it comes to Facebook, so you’re going to need to double check your hours, contact info, products and/or services listed, and any “more info” that you may have had on your profile before the big switch.
Types of Access with Meta’s New Page Experience
As mentioned before, you’re also going to want to check in on who has access to the business page now that it’s on Facebook’s New Page Experience.
Definitely revoke access for anyone that is no longer on your team or a business partner. Next evaluate the remaining team members access levels.
The NPE has a simpler role setup, with just two options:
- Full access
- Partial access
Full access level is exactly what it sounds like: these users have full authority to do anything with or on the page, including adjusting other members’ access levels.
Partial access allows users to view insights, respond to and manage comments and messages, and manage content and ads.
Anyone who was an editor, owner, or admin will automatically be granted full access to the switch, and anyone who was in a lower role will automatically be granted partial access.
Who can get Meta’s New Page Experience?
Eventually, every page will be switched over to the NPE, but since it’s such an overhaul, Meta is rolling it out slowly. Right now, the New Page Experience is available to many, but not all, business pages on Facebook.
Once your page has the option to switch to Facebook’s New Page Experience, you’ll see a notice on your page when you log in on a desktop.
If you prefer to manage your page from the Facebook app, you can easily check to see if your page is eligible to switch by tapping on “…More”, then tapping on “Settings”, and if your page is in fact able to switch you should see a button that says “New Page Experience”.
Have multiple pages for multiple locations in your dealer group?
No problem – you can easily see which of your pages have switched to the NPE and which are still Classic Pages by visiting https://www.facebook.com/pages/?category=your_pages – all pages with the “Switch Now” option are NPE and everything with “Create Post” and “Promote” buttons are still Classic Pages.
What’s next?
As much as we wish we had a magic crystal ball that could tell us what new annoyance Zuckerberg will throw our way next, we just don’t know what exactly the future holds for Facebook’s New Page Experience and how it will evolve over time. Based on our team’s experience with Facebook’s algorithms and the way Meta operates, we can make some predictions, though!
It’s likely that this new interface will lead to preferential treatment to those who adopt the NPE with open arms, probably in the form of showing up in users feeds more often.
We’ve got a hunch – okay maybe more of a hope – that as the NPE continues to roll out across more and more pages that they will remove some of the unnecessary options added to these pages that should truly be reserved for personal profiles only.
And our last prediction: it will likely become a bit more frustrating before all of the kinks are fully ironed out, so buckle up and get ready to roll with it.
Conclusion
We all know the social media ecosystem is ever-evolving, and this is simply the latest adaptation we need to make. While it’s annoying and frustrating that Meta is making these changes before they’ve worked out all the kinks, it’s simply what we’ve come to know as the norm from this social media giant.
It’s easy to get lost in the weeds with all of these details, so here are our top three action items to ensure you’re ready for the NPE switch:
- Check out and clean up who has access to interact as your page to ensure it isn’t fair game for past employees or team members who don’t manage your social media.
- Update your page’s info ahead of time so that once the NPE switch happens you’re set up for success right off the bat.
- Once the New Page Experience is in effect on your business’s page, embrace it! Don’t switch back to the Classic Page and risk losing content.
If rolling with it isn’t really your style, the social team at Dealer Authority is ready to hop in the driver’s seat of your Facebook page with our always-adaptable social strategies. Contact us to take the stress of social management off of your plate today!