THATBlog

If you administrate or belong to a fan page on Facebook, you may have noticed a new layout sometime in the past couple of weeks. As part of Facebook's new website design which started back in September 2008, Facebook finally rolled out the new fan page design. The new fan page design comes with new functionality that may have a pretty cool impact on the network as a whole. Facebook recently released an overview of the changes to come.

New Design
The new design makes fan pages look a lot more like typical profile pages. Fan pages now have display multiple tabs for video, photos, info and other applications. Additionally, fan pages have been redesigned so that the news stream is the focus of the page, as is also the case with profile pages. Overall, the new design seems to make it easier to organize information on fan pages and also puts an emphasis on fan updates and user comments.

New Functionality
According to Facebook, the way that fan pages interact with the rest of the network will also change in the near future. Eventually, fan pages will interact with the network more like the way individual profile pages do. For example, each time a fan page administrator adds a photo, shares a link, comments or posts an update to the fan page, that update could potentially stream to the news feeds of all its fans.

From the standpoint of a fan page administrator, this can be a great thing as more exposure will be given to the fan pages. In the past, marketing a fan page was a bit more difficult because fan page activities did not stream into news feeds the same way that profile activities did. It will be interesting to see how this impacts the rest of the network with regard to fan page growth and users willingness to become fans.

Sample Fan Page: