Here’s how Facebook let us know about these changes when we received our weekly Facebook email update:

And how we found out when we logged back into our Fan Page around 4 pm yesterday afternoon:

So what does this all mean?  Here’s our synopsis:

PROS:

POST AS YOU OR YOUR PAGE

You can now post a comment, post an update and “like” something on another business’ Page as either yourself or your Page.   This is fantastic news since you’ll be able to present your business when posting on a Page instead of you as an individual.  Think of all those additional opportunities to advertise and promote your Real Estate business on some highly trafficked pages!  After a little playing around with this feature this morning, it’s a little strange and will take some time to get used to, but overall it’s a great option to have for business owners such as Realtors.

Additional modifications can be made within the “Edit Page” link on the top right of your Facebook Page (the link used to be located directly under your Page image)

INSTANT EMAIL NOTIFICATIONS

Get instant notifications sent to your email address on file with Facebook when someone posts on your wall.  Great for immediate attention and staying in touch with prospective clients – If you have your email linked to your mobile phone, you can respond to wall posts on the go too…

POST RELEVANCE

Determine what is shown on the Wall and in what order.  As an admin to your Page, you can determine if everyone’s posts show or just yours.  The Everyone option will show users posts in order of most relevance (per Facebook determination) – recent posts by friends, posts by those that are not friends in the same country or same language and posts that have received many Likes and/or comments will be pushed to the top of the list.

IMAGES PHOTOSTRIP

Here’s an opportunity to get creative and systematic with what you have within your photos.  Image the ‘Featured Properties’ section on Realtor.com but on Facebook!  Use your imagination and use this hot space for promoting your market area, your open houses, your listings, and more!

CONS:

NO TABS / SMALLER LINKS

Your tabs along the top of your page have been removed and replaced with smaller, not so obvious text links beneath your page image. This will certainly diminish the likelihood of visitors checking out your other tabs, unless you include a call to action within your page’s image.

NARROWER CUSTOM LANDING TAB

*** UPDATE:  Rumor has it that this is a bug that Facebook is fixing so don’t go changing your Custom Page dimensions!:  If you already have a Custom Landing Tab you’ll need to get it revamped to fit the smaller, narrower space that is provided – from 520 px to 490 px wide.  That’s quite the difference from the original 700 px that Facebook initially had given us to play with back in the day (I mean, 6 months ago!)…

NARROWER AND SHORTER PAGE IMAGE

The same thing goes for your Page image. This size has also been reduced from 200 x 600 px to 180 x 540 px. Get out your Photoshop tools…

RESETTING OF LANDING PAGE

When you choose to upgrade (or when it becomes mandatory on March 1st), your landing tab for new visitors will be put back to the defaulted wall tab. If you have a custom landing tab set up for new visitors, you will need to reset it up again. This may go unnoticed by many for some time.

Overall the updates are ones that will be positive and welcomed for Real Estate Agent Facebook Page owners and administrators.  Personally, I believe they did their “accidental” update a month or so ago to get the initial reactions from the general Facebook Page owners and took those responses into consideration when making this final launch.  I’m very thankful that they chose to keep the ability to say which tab a new visitor lands on most of all.  First impressions last, and sometimes your wall is so filled with extraneous “stuff” that the call to action to “Like” your Page is overlooked, and off they go…

Let us know about your feelings and thoughts about this new update and what your the most happy about.

Nathan specializes in FBML or Facebook Mark Up Language.  Similar to what HTML does for your website FBML does for your Facebook Page.  As Nathan points out there are 500 million people on Facebook, many who are logging in multiple times per day.  How many visitors is your website or blog getting per month?  Why swim up stream when there is a “Facebook Boom” happening as Nathan calls it within the walls of this amazing social networking site.  Nathan helps business owners of all sizes customize their Facebook Page so that it captures leads, impresses prospective clients and allows for instant communication on the site where your prospects want to be and are spending the most time.  Everyone has a wall and an info tab but FBML enables completely custom designs and layout options and that is where Nathan comes in.  He creates a custom page with your branding, social media badges, email opt ins, video, etc.. and he will even teach you how he does it!  He has also launched a new live window that would allow for streaming an open house all within a tab on your Facebook tab.  Maybe the neighbors can’t make it or you have an out of town prospect that isn’t ready to fly in yet but they can indeed be right there by leveraging this savvy and innovative technology.

Where I can really appreciate what Nathan is doing is that just like a busy real estate agent, as a busy college student, he really understands the challenges of time and task management.  He showed me an awesome way to find real time status updates with search terms like “Move to Virginia” where you can find hot leads of current Facebook users that you aren’t even friends with!  Imagine seeing an update like “We are going to Move to Virginia and need to know where to live”.  You can respond but how?  Linking to a custom Facebook tab is a way to invite them to check you out, impress them with your marketing savviness, but without forcing them off of Facebook to your site right away.  Connecting and building a new relationship on Facebook is leading many agents to paychecks right now and with a custom landing page I can see ROI increasing for sure!

If you are as impressed as we are with Nathan’s FBML real estate pages and want to learn more you can hook up with him by simple visiting any of the sites below or by clicking on any of the images in this post:

www.NathanLatka.com

www.NathanLatka.com/Facebook

www.NathanLatka.com/Twitter

www.NathanLatka.com/YouTube