This was originally posted on NPowering, the blog of NPower Seattle on August 16, 2010.

Back in October, Facebook announced that they are making some changes to pages within their site, and they have recently announced that these changes will go into effect on August 23rd. If your organization has a Facebook page, you should make sure that you are setup in accordance with the new guidelines to ensure that you do not have troubles.

A main item to check out with these changes are any custom landing pages or other applications that you may be using for your nonprofit. Landing pages and any other applications are now going to be limited to 520 pixels in width. (A few months ago, I wrote a blog post with some instructions on how to develop a custom Facebook landing page.) I went through this week and adjusted the size of our new landing page to make sure that we’re all set for August 23rd, and you should too. Here are some tips:

  • If your page is image based like ours, you should go into your photo editor (e.g. Photoshop) and reset the image size to have a width of 520 pixels. Then replace the hosted versions of your images with the new smaller ones. If you can give your re-sized, hosted images the same name as your old images, then you shouldn’t have to change the code in your Facebook page. Make sure to look at your page in a couple of browsers to make sure everything looks right after making your changes.
  • If your page has more HTML setup, the process to resize the page will likely be a bit more involved. You will still need to resize your image(s), but you may have to edit the HTML behind your page to make sure that everything still fits into the new space.

They are also officially getting rid of “Boxes”, both as an item on your wall and as additional tabs. If your Facebook page has any items in Boxes, you will want to get those moved by next week. You can read more about these changes on Facebook’s official blog.

With the addition of a new staff member from NPower Oregon we now offer more training and consulting services in the areas of social media audits, assessment strategic planning and tools.  In addition we are excited to simply have more capacity to share tips,  tricks and resources to help your organization become more strategic in your social media efforts. If you need assistance setting up your Facebook presence, or adjusting it to the new settings, let us know how we can help.

We also have some Social Media trainings coming up that may be of help: