What does implementing New Pages Experience mean? Shortcut 

1. The New Pages Experience was rolled out in October 2020 for selected categories of Pages, mostly professionals. In the upcoming months, it will be rolled out to every Page. 
2. The initial idea behind New Pages Experience is to give more tools and possibilities for professionals to manage their presence on the platform in a more secure way. 
3. It’s always possible to switch back to the classic Page, though there are some consequences. 
4. The number of Facebook fans will no longer be available in the New Pages Experience. 
5. If you’re using third-party apps for analyzing your Facebook stats, some inconsistencies might occur right after making the switch (especially with the number of fans).

What is the New Pages Experience? 

Let’s start with explaining what the New Pages Experience (let’s call it NPE for now) actually is. 

As Facebook claims, the New Pages Experience is :

a way for public figures, businesses and others who want to build and connect with an audience manage their professional presence on Facebook.

It sounds like the New Pages Experience is not dedicated to everyone. It’s partially true as for now it’s available only for a selected group of people. However, as Facebook representatives some time ago informed that the NPE will be rolled out to all Pages in the upcoming months of 2021. 

Side note
It’s 2022 already, and not every Facebook Page has been transferred to the NPE.

This is what the New Pages Experience looks like: 

New Pages Experience

A classic Facebook Page

Carry on reading to discover the differences between these two. 

Who and when can switch to the New Pages Experience?

The New Pages Experience has been active since October 2nd, 2020 (however, the official statement was published on January 6, 2021) and is now available only for selected categories of Facebook Pages, mostly professionals, for example: politicians, actors, dancers, artists or athletes. 

You can see the full list of Pages that can now switch to the New Pages Experience here. 

Once you switch to the NPE, it’s always possible to go back to the classic Page. Even though it’s always possible, you need to be aware of the consequences of such a move. These are the most significant ones:

• If you’ve created ad campaigns and they were still active, they will be stopped with no possibility to restart them. However, this doesn’t affect how Facebook video ads work in general.
• All the content created with the use of the New Pages Experience, will be lost (including posts, photos, videos). 
• Obviously, you’ll also lose access to all the features available only from the New Pages Experience, e.g. simplified insights.

Note that all the data and assets that can’t be transferred between the New Pages Experience and the classic Page can be downloaded. Here you’ll find instructions on how to do that.

Differences between the New Pages Experience and a classic Facebook Page

Even though at this point not every Page owner can switch to the NPE, you may still wonder why Facebook introduced it and what are the benefits. Over time, the New Pages Experience will be turned on for all categories of Pages, so it’s good to know what we can expect. 

For now, the main differences are: 

• A refreshed Page layout (as shown above)
• Simplified and more actionable insights (including new metric Use Page)
• More relevant notifications 
• New Q&A format (probably something similar to what we know from Instagram Stories)
• Two new permission types: full control or partial access 
• New Page News Feed that will be separated from the personal one (including an easy switch between these two) to help make interactions as a public figure with others

source

Some features are now (most probably only temporarily) disabled and not available:

• Replying to a comment in a private message if you’re using the API to do so
• Business features, e.g. jobs
• Reviews and check-ins
• Some publishing tools, e.g. scheduling posts or pinned posts 
• Some page roles, for example, moderator and editor (only the 2 new ones mentioned above will be available)

New Pages Experience & analyzing data from Facebook

There is also a quite significant change when it comes to some data presented by Facebook, especially the number of likes and followers a Page has. 

As there’s not really much to summarize and Facebook stated these changes pretty clearly, here is all we should know about the future of Page likes and followers:  

• If someone likes and follows your classic Page, they will continue to be a follower for the new Page and added to your total follower count.
• If someone likes your classic Page, but does not follow it, they will not transfer to your new Page as a follower.
• If someone follows your classic Page, but does not choose to like it, they will still transfer to your new Page as a follower.
• Page likes will not be supported on your new Page, and Page like count will no longer be accessible.

We may ask why did Facebook decide for such a drastic move? According to its representatives, the number of followers is a much better indicator of a fan base, as followers are users that are more interested in what each Page has to offer. 

With Page likes the situation is slightly different: when a person likes a Page, he or she automatically follows it as well, but can also unfollow it anytime, and then he is no longer receiving any updates.

What does this mean in practice? 

Well, Page likes will be permanently removed from Facebook at some point in the future, and it will no longer be possible to analyze them. 

What about now? 

If you still have a classic Page, nothing changes for now. Your Page and data remain unchanged, unless you decide to switch to the New Pages Experience. 

However, if you’ve already switched to the New Pages Experience (or you’re about to do so) you should pay more attention to some of your metrics, especially if you’re using an external tool for analyzing your Facebook data, e.g. Sotrender. 

As we are monitoring all these data on a daily basis, we’ve discovered that for Pages that have switched to the NPE, there might be some inconsistencies in presenting the number of fans (as this metric no longer exists for NPE).

At some point, your chart with the number of fans might look like below. 

The sharp increase on October 19th was the day when the Page switched to the New Pages Experience.

This is because the Facebook API (which data providers, as Sotrender, use to gather data from Facebook) in the transition period is showing under the number of fans label, the number of people that follow this Page instead.

For now, it’s not possible to get through the API the number of fans and the number of followers separately, as a metric showing the number of people following any Page is not available. Probably it’ll be deployed later on. 

Also, after the switch to the New Pages Experience, some more data about a Page might not be available through the API, however, as for now, we didn’t observe any more troubles. 

Let’s experience the New Pages Experience

That’s all for now. It’s just the beginning of the New Pages Experience, and not that many Facebook Pages have switched to it yet. We expect more information, and opinions, to appear once the NPE will be rolled out for more Pages. 

We’ll keep the text updated!