The New Facebook Layout Explained

If you’ve used Facebook recently for your business page, you might have seen quite a few changes have taken place. Some of these changes can be tricky to get your head around as things have moved around and some new functions have replaced others, so in this blog I want to share with you how the Facebook layout has changed and where to find what you need.

Everything is now located under ‘Meta Business Suite’

Facebook Business Suite has now been combined with Instagram and messenger to form ‘Meta Business Suite’ (so if you use Instagram as well, make sure you get everything linked here under the one account).

Meta Business Suite can be used on both your desktop and mobile devices, and according to Facebook, has been designed to make it easy for you to view notifications, respond to messages quickly, and save time when creating connections with more people.

Features of Meta Business Suite include:

• Posting across platforms – one post can be shared on both Facebook and Instagram without you having to switch accounts
• All your messages and comments from Facebook, Instagram and Messenger will be in your inbox here
• Creating ads
• Tracking insights and trends to see how well your posts are performing
• Review all activity from Facebook and Instagram in the notifications tab
• Access helpful tools like Ads manager, Commerce Manager and business settings

The new planner is useful for posting

This is a great calendar for your all your posts. It enables you to create and schedule posts directly, but it also allows you to look back on previous posts to see how they performed and further insights.

Publishing tools also allows you to view everything you’ve posted with the ability to click on each post for further insights. You can also create new posts here and see scheduled and draft posts too.

Insights have been updated

I’ve always been a fan of Facebook insights for the wealth of information it contains on post and page performance, so it’s great to see that this has been updated and that Instagram insights are also included here.

If you’d like to learn more about this area and how using Insights can benefit your business, book on to my Insights Workshop (available as a group or one to one session) where I’ll cover everything you need to know along with some helpful tips and tricks. Contact me for more details.

Business pages are now profiles

You might have already noticed that your business pages now have a profile, so you can switch between your business page to your personal page easily. This is designed to enable you to manage your business pages and interactions more effectively however it isn’t working well for everyone at the moment. There are some little gremlins hiding here and there!

Another gremlin being reported at the moment is that scheduled Instagram posts aren’t posting correctly. A quick fix for this is to disconnect your Instagram page from Meta Business Suite and then re-add it but it must be the owner of the page that does this (so if you’re a social media manager acting as an admin, this is a task only your client can do).

There is also a newsfeed area where you can see all the updates from the pages that you follow (much like your personal newsfeed). This is great for further interaction opportunities!

While it looks like some areas have disappeared since the change, they’ve often just been moved to other parts of Meta Business Suite. My advice is to spend some time acquainting yourself with the new layout, exploring what’s hiding under each menu and button, and get to know this new tool as well as you can to help you save time and energy managing your Facebook and Instagram posts in the future.