12/10/2022
If you are an administrator of your church’s Facebook Page, you may have seen a recent notification on your Page about a ‘new Pages experience’ coming soon.
Anyone that has spent time managing a Facebook Page will be familiar with Facebook’s regular tweaks, updates and roll-outs of new features.
But what does this notification mean for you and your church Page?
Pictured above: Notification you may have had on your church Facebook page.
Firstly – there’s nothing to panic about.
The most important thing to know about these upcoming changes is that nothing drastic will happen to your public facing page. You won’t have to re-enter any information, or lose any likes or followers.
Your page design will alter slightly, as Facebook aim to provide pages with a “cleaner and more intuitive layout” for users. So, for example, your page bio and posts will be easier for your followers to see moving forward.
Facebook will also be removing the public facing stat of ‘page likes’ – choosing to emphasise ‘page followers’.*
*What’s the difference? – Someone can ‘like’ your page without being a ‘follower’. When someone chooses to follow your page, they’re telling Facebook that they want to see your content in their News Feed. You’re more likely to see content from pages that you ‘follow’ over pages that you only ‘like’.
What are the key changes?
1) A new News Feed
The key changes will only be noticeable by those running the page(s).
Firstly, there will now be a News Feed for your page. Just like your personal page, where you can see content from family and friends on your News Feed, you will have the same view for your church account – being able to see and interact with other pages your church page follows.
This is in an attempt to make it easier for page administrators to engage with the online community – therefore boosting the visibility of your church page and hopefully leading to a growth in followers and engagement.
It will also be easier to switch from your personal profile to your page profile, to make interacting with other content easier.
Find out more here.
2) A change to supporting roles
If you have ‘administrator’ access to your page, nothing will change for you in terms of what you can and can’t do/see.
However, the additional page roles of ‘editor’, ‘advertiser’, and ‘moderator’ will lose access to features and tools, and instead, by assigned ‘task access’ by the page administrator.
When someone is granted ‘task access’ they will be able to access existing tools such as; Creator Studio, Business Suite, Business Manager, and Ads Manager – depending on the tasks to which they’re assigned.
As well as giving access to certain tools, you can give access to particular features, such as; Content, Messaging, Community activity, Ads, Insights.
For most church pages, setting everyone to administrator will be the most likely outcome.
(We recommend having at least two people set as full administrators on your page.)
If you happen to work with a team of people on your Facebook page, this update may be a good time for you to review the specific roles of your team, and delegate particular roles, should you want to.
Expected timing
These updates will begin to roll out over the coming days/weeks – and some pages will convert earlier than others.
You should get a notification in advance of changes being applied to your page.
Not seeing a notification? At the moment it is only Pages that Facebook classifies as belonging to a non profit organisation that are in line for the update. It’s possible that not all church Pages may be recognised and classified as such.
