Many of us with admin permissions on Facebook pages have been getting notices these past few weeks about a new "Services" template designed for businesses that will be applied to our pages, unless we opt out.
It looks like Facebook is rolling out a new initiative that suggests a run at Google's dominance in the lucrative business location arena.
In addition to the new “service-oriented” template, I've seen notices to refine our data on Open Streets (an open source map FB uses). And, work to redesign and refine their reviews/recommendations. There’s good info about this all online.
What they haven’t talked about yet (to my knowledge) is whether there's a new strategy to monetize these changes (will ads will be delivered in a new way on the re-templated pages?), akin to how Yelp and Google deliver similar sponsored business and service listings.
For many of us right now, the immediate concern is to make sure our pages don’t get converted to a template that may not make sense for them. If you notice that your page suddenly looks different, go into your "Settings," click on "Edit Page" and that'll open up a dashboard that features "Templates." Of the many available, most of us were using the "Standard" template (the original default). Select that and your page will return to its former look.
If you run into any issues, contact us.