Facebook is at it again. I realize that change can be good sometimes, but Facebook has a way of making changes with no notice or notification to people. And then everyone has to scramble to wrap their heads around the newest changes and learn how to incorporate and use them properly. Bah.
This week my frustration was in regards to changes to Business Pages. I administer several pages, so this new update affected me in a big way. I post content to pages, respond to comments and questions, and wander through other page’s feeds commenting and liking as appropriate. My problem was I was no longer able to switch my identity to a page.
ACK!
I needed to like a page for a page I administer and could no longer simply become that page. Not cool Facebook! I cast everything else aside—I cannot offer my services if I can’t provide them—and delved into the problem.
There had to be a way to like pages as a page. It wouldn’t make sense to eliminate that function. Why would FB do that, I fumed.
Finally, I discovered that you could click on the ellipsis at the end of the tabs and scroll down to ‘Like as Your Page’. Once you do that, you have the option to like the page as whichever page you choose.
Brilliant!
That was only one step of my dilemma. I still needed to figure out how to go to the news feeds of the pages I administer. There is no way I can like (or want to like for that matter) all of the pages which the pages I administer like. There are hundreds of them! But for love nor money I couldn’t figure it out. And I have to tell you that Facebook doesn’t make it easy to figure out either.
So today I broke down and started typing potential questions into the FB Help Center. For any of you who have done this, you know this can be an exercise in frustration itself. I went through several different wording variations of my problem with lacklustre results. The responses can be maddeningly random and usually nowhere near helpful, but I persevered. There had to be other people who were struggling with my issue and, more importantly, an answer.
Stubbornness stands me in good stead when it comes to research; I prevailed! And found several other people all lamenting the same thing as me – we can’t surf as our pages! HELP! Thank goodness for community forums. My sanity is saved and now I shall save yours.
How to Use Facebook as a Page
- Go to your page’s timeline
- Look in first box on left-hand side for View Pages Feed
- Click on See posts from other Pages
- A Pages Feed will open where you will see a stream of posts from pages which your page likes
- The default setting is to like and comment as your page, but you can still click on your icon and switch to liking and commenting as yourself or any other page you administer
So for those of you who were struggling with Facebook’s most recent changes as well, I hope this helps you. If it did, do me a favour and head over to my business page and give me a like as your page. I appreciate it.
High fives to all for wading through the ever-complicated world of social media and social networking with me. Cheers!
A Writer's Take 
I admin one site for a personal hobby and two sites for my job. I’ve figured out the workarounds (all of which take longer), but my biggest issues are the slooooow page feed and the messed up notifications. When I am working, I don’t want to see my personal notifications light up! And when I finally do manage to navigate to my business notifications, they don’t work. Sometimes I don’t get business notifications at all. Other times, I get multiple notifications for the exact same comment. And if it’s a thread with a lot of comments and replies, clicking the notification takes you to the top of the post instead of where the comment/reply occurred. If a comment triggered the notification, you can at least set the comments to chronological and scroll to the bottom. If it’s a reply to a comment, though, you pretty much have to scroll through the *entire* conversation. A HUGE time-waster if it’s a very active thread. Dislike! And the fact that there was no notice given in advance and no official comment from Facebook makes me wonder what their next move might be. Are they trying to make the system so bad that it forces everyone to use Business Manager? So far, the feedback I’ve heard on BM is that it makes it easier to order advertising – and harder to interact with your community!
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I only recently heard about Business Manager myself. Every time Facebook starts a new thing, dollar signs start flashing in my head too. I get that I have to keep up with the times, especially if that’s why clients are hiring me, but like you noted – where’s the notification? Where’s the lead-up? Facebook isn’t great about official notifications in my recollection though.
The one thing I noticed after publishing this, is that now there is a small highlighted banner on the link to page news feeds now. Maybe they realized too many people were freaking out and they thought they should do something about it!
Good luck wading through the ever-changing world of SM Auntie Kimberly! Hope to bump into you again around these parts.
Katherine
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[…] not saying it will be easy, but Facebook has made changes before. There have been cries that organic reach would die. And that just didn’t come to […]
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