New Facebook Page Admin: Impacts and Workarounds

New Facebook Page Admin Panel Removes Notification Pane: Impacts and Workarounds

It was a bit of a rude awakening: I popped open one of the Facebook pages I manage for various Metaverse Mod Squad clients, focused in on its admin panel, and… okay, where did the notifications pane go?!? In its place was now a dynamic table displaying recent posts I had made on behalf of the page, listing each post’s current reach (number of people who had seen it) and a button to turn it into a (paid) promoted post. This same change had happened to all the pages I managed. I was even more befuddled when I spoke with a fellow MMSer who shared duties on one of the pages I was managing, and she reported still seeing the old-style admin panel for that page.

A quick Google check brought some answers: apparently Facebook is doing some unannounced testing of this new-style page admin panel with selected accounts. So far there is very little information about this test rollout anywhere on the net, and none from Facebook itself – although there has been considerable comment about it in Facebook’s Community Forums, the vast majority expressing frustration with the change.

With what info I could glean from the net as my guide, I quickly figured out that the new “Notifications” button at the top of the admin panel would take me to the Notifications screen, where all my page’s notifications for the past week were safe and sound. Alright, I can work with that, I suppose … though there was no denying it was less handy to have to click back and forth between the Notifications screen and the main page, especially considering that as a diligent page manager I check each page’s notifications several times a day.

As someone in marketing myself, I certainly can’t fault Facebook for wanting to try out ever newer and better ways to sell ads and earn money from its humongous community – after all, they’re a business, not a free public resource. I do confess that I’m curious as to whether any jump in promoted post sales they see from this test are significant enough to offset any hit to that intangible asset of goodwill among their page managers.

But in the meantime, there have always been multiple other ways to get at a page’s notifications stream – in fact, a wise page manager actively seeks redundancy in these vital notifications, lest he or she miss some crucial posting from, say, an irate customer that could blow up into a social media firestorm. So here are the workarounds I’ve gathered:

• First of all, as I said above, the past week’s notifications are still available on the new-style admin panel at the click of the new Notifications button, which displays a little red bubble when there’s something new to look at.
• The little globe icon at the top left of the page screen still works for notifications – and likewise displays that little red bubble when there’s new info.
• Notifications are available as an RSS feed, via a link on the Notifications screen (whether you’re dealing with the new admin panel or the old one). Firefox has RSS feed wrangling support built right in; Chrome offers a variety of extensions and apps to do the same.
• Facebook’s Page Manager app allows your smartphone to alert you of incoming notifications for your pages.

And what of the new Posts pane that Facebook is substituting for the Notifications pane? Confession time again: I’m lukewarm at best over it. Frankly, the way I’ve seen MMS manage Facebook advertising buys for our clients is to plan them out in advance with careful consideration of budgets, as opposed to spur-of-the-moment promoted-post buys such as this new pane seems to be fishing for. Perhaps, if this new pane should become a permanent fixture, we’ll develop ways of using it effectively. But in the meantime, we’ve got the issue covered here at MMS.

Caption: Old-style admin panel with Notifications pane
(highlighted in red).

Caption: New-style admin panel with Posts pane
(highlighted in red; confidential info on this page blacked out).

Ellen Brenner
Social Media Community Manager