If you’ve been frustrated by some of the options open to you as a Page admin on Facebook, then new changes launched today might help to soothe your woes.

Until now, anything you did on Facebook outside of your Page was always credited to you as an individual. So, for example, if you wanted to comment on the wall of another Page on behalf of your organisation, that option wasn’t available – you were always posting as you, the real person. A few of us adopted some complicated workarounds, such as creating fake personal profiles – it worked technically, but often confused other users (as well as sadly contravening Facebook’s profile policy!).

From today, if you choose to Upgrade your Page, all Page Admins will now see an option on the top right to ‘Use Facebook as [your Page]“. Toggling this option allows you to generally ‘act’ in the same way as your Page as you would normally as a ‘real person’!

You can now therefore makes comments all over Facebook as your Page, you can ‘Like’ other pages and show those links on your Page and also see a bespoke News Feed of activity based on the community of people around your Page. It effectively acts in the same way you’ve come to expect from your own personal interactions on Facebook – a welcome step forward for the platform.

However, every silver loaning has a cloud – navigate to Edit Info > Marketing > Send An Update, and you’ll see that you can still only send a Message to Fans when you’re ‘acting’ as yourself, not as your Page. However, you might have noticed some big upgrades to the Message system recently, and we’re hoping that, when combined with today’s changes, visibility for Updates sent to Fans might improve.

As with the recently introduced personal profile design, you can also now show off your most recent photos at the top of the Page, there’s a tidier navigation design on the left hand side of the page, and there’s also additional new filters & settings options to investigate.

Clear as mud? Or are you already a Fan of the new changes to Pages? Let us know what you think!