5. Hide/delete unwanted posts.
Warning: With the redesign, old unwanted posts may automatically be incorporated into your Timeline by Facebook. Fortunately, Facebook offers a tool that will enable you to hide or delete old posts that reflect badly on your business, or simply need to be removed.

6. Be aware of “visitor graffiti."

One of the dicier elements of Facebook’s new start page is that it is so chillingly efficient at tracking what Facebook friends are saying about your company. For good or bad, all those opinions will show up in an activity box just below your banner photo.

Essentially, your company may spend tens of thousands or even millions of marketing dollars to ensure your start page on Facebook looks and feels just right. But all those considerable efforts can be undone in a nanosecond if my friend Wilbur has a bad experience with your restaurant, and posts an especially nasty review about what happened while he is on Facebook. Unfortunately, the way the new start page is designed, Wilbur’s thumbs-down review will pop up, front and center, in an activity box on your page.



Adding insult to injury, right next to Wilbur’s review, Facebook may also post a picture of Wilbur’s smiling (or snarling) face.

Of course, the reverse is true. If my friend Madeline absolutely adores her experience at your business, and posts that review while on Facebook, her glowing accolade will also probably also pop up on your company start page any time any of Madeline’s Facebook friends stop by.

As you might imagine, the graffiti factor has hoards of businesses squirming both ways.

7. Consider private messaging.

As a kind of counterbalance to the graffiti factor, Facebook has introduced company/visitor private messaging with this latest upgrade. The feature enables your company to handle tricky customer service problems via private messaging. It’s a welcome relief to scores of restaurants who previously were often forced to publicly wrestle customer complaints and pubic relations nightmares on Facebook walls.
“The feature we really love and use frequently is the option for guests to send us private messages,” says Red Robin’s Everett. “Should a comment be posted that we would like to follow up on and take that specific conversation off our main wall, the user now has the option to share privately information he or she may not feel comfortable sharing in a public forum.”

Of course, if you’d rather not handle customer complaints in this way, Facebook enables you to eliminate private messaging altogether.

8. Say goodbye to custom landing pages.

In another controversial move, the latest Facebook redesign no longer allows businesses to create custom landing pages. Every visitor who clicks to your Facebook presence is automatically routed to your start page. No exceptions.

More than a few businesses are grousing about this particular mandate, given that many had spent considerable time and money coming up with stunning custom landing pages that worked just fine, thank you, under Facebook’s previous design format.

9. Check out the new admin panel.

Virtually every aspect of your Facebook presence can be managed and monitored from the new Admin Panel. Here, you can work with page and privacy settings and engage in private messaging with visitors. You can also monitor visitor activity with Admin Panel, including who’s “Liking” your brand.

10. Get more help.

There’s plenty of help available for companies looking to migrate to Facebook's new look and feel at Facebook’s help center.

Joe Dysart is an Internet speaker and business consultant based in New York City.