Facebook Fan Pages No Longer Require Switching Views to See Notifications

If you manage a Facebook "fan" page, you're probably aware that a feature was added earlier this year which notifies us when people comment on our page or post something to our wall. Before seeing these notifications though, we needed to click that "Use Facebook as Your Organization's Name" link. But Facebook recently changed the process…for the better.

New Notifications Feature

To see the new notifications feature in action, log into your Facebook account and visit the various fan pages you manage. You should see the "Notifications" link in the right column under "Use Facebook as Your Organization's Name" (see Figure 1). If you have any messages, you can click the notifications link to view them (see Figure 2).

Figure 1. New Notifications Option

Figure 2. Showing Notifications

Note that you'll still need to click the "Use Facebook as …" link to see the list of new people who "like" your page.

What Do You Mean Better?

As hinted at earlier, the recent update improved my work flow. It's a minor improvement, but helpful none-the-less. When managing multiple fan pages, here was the typical process:

1. Log into Facebook
2. Visit the first fan page
3. Click the "Use Facebook as …" link
4. Process any new notifications
5. Click the "Use Facebook as Patrick" link
6. Visit another fan page
7. Repeat steps 3-6 until all Facebook pages have been reviewed

Beyond the extra steps required to process notifications, there is a minor issue with switching between using Facebook as an organization and myself. Whenever I forget to click the "Use Facebook as Patrick" link before going to the next fan page, the right column that provides all the admin options goes blank.

Of course, there is an option to "Switch back to Patrick" under the Account tab at the top (see Figure 3), but this sends me back to the news feed for my personal Facebook page. So the best option appears to be going back to the organization's page that I'm still logged in as and clicking the link to use Facebook as myself.

Figure 3. Facebook Account Tab

Related Posts

• Facebook Pages for Organizations Now Easier to Manage Due to Recent Update – post about the notifications feature which was added to fan pages back in February 2011
• Quickly Switching Views for Facebook Fan Pages – an update to the above post which corrects a few inaccuracies