Facebook announced that it is rolling out a massive overhaul to its Pages, providing a boost to small and medium businesses with more free tools to be able to reach out to current and potential customers.
According to Facebook's official announcement posted on the social network, over one billion visit Pages per month, with more people accessing Pages to know more about businesses. The overhaul will look to assist businesses in building their mobile presence on Facebook.
The over 45 million active businesses on Facebook will now have new and more prominent call-to-action buttons at the forefront of their Pages, which can be anything from contacting the business to booking an appointment to placing an order for a product. The button is now located below the cover photo of Pages, with Facebook saying that it is testing a variety of call-to-action buttons with more to be added in the future.
Facebook also said that there will be new sections for Pages to allow businesses to feature information which would be the most relevant for their companies. The first new section is the Shop section, which would allow retail businesses to showcase the products that they offer, and the second new section is the Services section, which allow services businesses to highlight what they can do for customers. As with call-to-action buttons, Facebook said that more sections will be added to Pages soon.
The layout of Pages will also undergo improvement to make it easier to navigate through them on mobile devices, with all the information accessible without having to do lots of tapping and scrolling. The new layout, which will be launched over the next few weeks, will feature corresponding tabs for the sections of Pages, with all the highlights of each section also displayed in the Home tab for each business.
Facebook then calls upon businesses to optimize their Pages for mobile, and to look at Facebook as the mobile solution for their businesses.
At an event announcing the change, executives of Facebook also said that it is still working on improvements for searchability, so that users that search for certain business-related terms on Facebook's search bar would be directed to feasible options.
"There's a lot more we could do with discovery," product manager Michael Sharon said to Business Insider. "There's a lot more we could do to help people discover great Pages, great businesses nearby. We're not really doing that yet. There's more we could do there."
