Facebook has made some big changes to the way pages are managed and displayed which will give brands new opportunities to reach those 500+million users out there.

By selecting ‘Use Facebook as a Page’ you will be able to run your page like your own personal Facebook profile.

So you’ll get notifications about comments, new users or other activity on your page. You’ll be able to interact with other pages as your brand, meaning you can Like another brand, comment on their page and see their stories in your news feed.

Being able to comment and post as your business in other areas of Facebook can really help you increase engagement with the niche audiences you’re trying to reach.

It’s that ripple effect where each time someone comments or Likes your post, it gets seen by everyone in their network. Then some of them might Like your comment too, helping you spread your brand’s message to hundreds more people.

Being able to switch easily between pages is useful if, like me, you’re the admin on several different pages. It also helps avoid that awful feeling that you’ve accidentally published a comment in the wrong profile. (Er, not that I ever do that of course).

Facebook Insights – already a really useful way of monitoring the activity on your page -  means you can track daily, weekly or monthly active users and whether post views and feedback are going up or down and export the data as a report.

The layout is also slightly different, with a place to showcase images at the top of your page, just like has been added recently on personal profile pages. As well as being useful for major brands like Coca-Cola, for whom user-generated images are already a key part of the success of their page, it will also give Facebook even more appeal to small businesses as the corner of the web where they choose to promote themselves. Why pay a designer and developer to create a website which is may be difficult to update yourself when you can just create a page for your brand on Facebook for free, show off your latest products and get all that lovely customer interaction?

More and more small businesses are thinking this way, which unfortunately is not such great news if your own small business offers web design and development.