Facebook brand pages will now look more like…personal pages. We’ve already gone through the process of migrating Argyle’s brand page to the new timeline layout, and the process and results were nearly identical to when we had migrated our personal pages last year.

The biggest change for marketers is this: you are no longer allowed to use Facebook as Yet Another Ad Network. You have to be social. What does that mean?

• Marketers used to set a default tab, and then plaster a full-page promotion across it. This isn’t social media marketing–this is banner advertising. Facebook says no.
• Marketers used to “ask for the Like” everywhere they possibly could. Real people don’t do this, and it has now been disallowed in primary content areas.
• Marketers used to only interact in public, in ways that encourage virality. Real people also exchange private messages, pure 1:1 communications. Facebook now enables this.

These changes are extremely disruptive to a certain type of Facebook marketing. If your existing strategy relies heavily on custom tabs and opt-in content, you’re going to need to rethink it.

At Argyle, we encourage social media marketers to develop a personality around their brands. A good social strategy starts off with the question “If your brand were a person, who would it be?” Knowing your brand’s personality allows you to convey it succinctly and compellingly on social networks, where authenticity and personality are the best ways to connect to your audience.

These new Facebook changes force marketers to treat their brands like personalities, and to treat Facebook like a social platform, not just another ad network. We think this is great news for brands and for their customers. In fact, some top brands have already made the switch and are illustrating how powerful the new tools are.

Will the migration process be bumpy? Undoubtedly. Facebook isn’t exactly known for being brand-friendly when it makes changes like this. Many of these new features aren’t yet available in an API, so marketers won’t be able to rely on their management tool of choice for the moment. Hopefully that will change in the near future.