Facebook Lets Users 'Login as Page'

Just moments ago, I was on Facebook. Of course, I’m always on Facebook, but specifically this time I was on Facebook managing our company Facebook page. There were important statuses needing updating!

As I was browsing around on Facebook, I noticed a new option at the top of the page. With all the recent design changes, it wasn’t all that surprising to find something I didn’t see before. The question was whether this was new or just something I had previously overlooked. A lone button sat atop the page where the Like button would be that said, “Login as Page”. Not knowing what the button was for, I naturally clicked it immediately.

Nothing that crazy happened. The page momentarily refreshed. Everything looked as it always had. However, suddenly I had new notifications.

Going back to my home page was when things got interesting. I was no longer me! According to Facebook, I was Promediacorp! It was a very surreal feeling. Fortunately, switching back to my profile wasn’t too complicated. Clicking on Account brought up the option to log back in as myself (or Harry Hamilton in this case).

A new feature was clearly being launched. “Identity Switch”, as the PHP file handling this is named, is the newest of Facebook’s many new developments over the past few months. This will now allow users to login and access Facebook as a page, an entire separate Facebook entity from their personal self. This is a much needed feature, as when multiple people are admining the page, you often get someone commenting on a page’s update as the page rather than themselves. It looks rather silly when a Facebook Page posts, “How was everyone’s day?” and immediately responds to itself, “Mine was great! How about yours?”

So, gone should be the days of not being able to interact with your own page. Now you can comment and like items on your page as yourself, and when you’re ready to act on behalf of the page, a simple button makes it possible. What’s more interesting is how this will extend beyond to other elements of Facebook. Will you be targeted with ads specifically as a Facebook Page? Could I then target page owners as they browse Facebook?

In addition, it seems that pages would now be able to meander about Facebook commenting and liking other people’s updates.

I was excited to explore this feature more, but Facebook went down. Perhaps the crash was related to this roll out, or could just be a coincidence. We’ll see if there’s more information when Facebook is back up and running.

UPDATE: Facebook came back up, sans the changes. So, looks like they have a couple of kinks to work out before trying this again.