Facebook pages: big changes on the way

Inside Facebook has the story about changes due in the next few weeks:

With the Pages redesign, business Pages will now look much more like Facebook profile pages. According to information provided to advertisers, Facebook is moving Pages to a “Wall and tabs” design:

* The Wall tab, containing all the latest updates and Wall posts, will become front and center.
* Most static information will live on an “Info” tab, and most Photos will now live on a “Photos” tab.
* Most custom content and application boxes will be moved to a “Boxes” tab, though some narrow boxes can remain on the “Wall” tab.
* Page admins can add more application tabs to their Page if they so choose.

In addition, Page admins can now share Status Updates on their page like regular Facebook users can on their own profile.

You can read more here.

What impact will this have? The changes are likely to make pages (even) more useful and popular and so will help cement Facebook’s domination over MySpace, Bebo and others.

For those in politics (and assuming the changes aren’t just limited to pages run by businesses), it will shift the balance in the usual should I have a profile, or a group or a page discussion. Pages have much going for them at the moment, but they can be a bit passive – with no status updates and with messages to their fans not going in to people’s main list of messages on Facebook. This can be good – e.g. if you know that you won’t often have news or updates to share – but it can also be a problem.

On the other hand, the combination of a page and the right applications can bring big advantages over what you can do with a group or a profile. With these changes I think the judgement will now more often be on the side of using pages, with the status updates feature being particularly popular.