Business Pages Photo Stream: What You Need To Know

This Facebook marketing tip relates to the official & places pages marketing tools in Facebook. For clarification on where this tip fits into the greater Facebook marketing picture, please view our post Facebook Foundations: Facebook’s Marketing Tools Explained.

On February 10, 2011, Facebook made a major upgrade to its pages product resulting in many questions from page administrators about the new layout and functionality.  One of the most common is about the photo stream at the top of the new pages layout.  Although similar in visual layout (some may actually say identical) to that of our profile, the photo stream on pages doesn’t function the same way it does on our profiles – there are two distinct differences which are the source of common questions for page administrators.

1.  Displays only photos from the page:  The photo strip is comprised only of photos that have been posted by an administrator of the page (the most recent 5).  If you allow fans to post photos to your wall (you can turn this on or off in the page manager), photos posted by fans will not appear in the photo stream.

This is different from profiles where any photo that you are tagged in – whether you uploaded it, or another Facebook user uploaded it – will appear in the photo stream of your profile.

2.  Randomized:  The photo stream is randomized. Upon every page refresh, the photos will appear in a different order.  In other words, page administrators can not control the order of the 5 photos.

For example, here are screen shots from the Pixel Coaching fan page where I have uploaded 4 color blocks representing the logo colors along with an image of the Pixel Coaching logo.  See how the images can be rendered in any order:

When purposefully picking the images that appear in your pages photo stream (which represents a brilliant branding opportunity), you will need to take into consideration this nuance which is in contrast to the linear/static orientation that the photo stream has on profile pages which allows for some very creative visual tricks.

Hiding Photos

Another common question about the photo stream is how to have a photo not appear there.  It is possible and works the same way it does on your profile.  Simply hover over the image on your page in the photo stream and you will see a you will see a little “x” appear in the upper right hand corner of the image which, when selected, will hide the photo from appearing in the photo stream of your page.

Understanding how the photo stream works on pages is the basis for creatively using this Facebook feature to brand your page and build your business.  Have you seen any great examples of business page photo streams?  Let us know in the comments.