Hands on with the new Facebook Pages Manager app for Android
Facebook has been on a roll lately with the Android app updates – not only do we finally have a Facebook app that runs on native code instead of HTML5, but we also have voice messaging in Facebook’s Messenger app. And now, as of several days ago, we have a Facebook Pages Manager app.
Now, if you don’t run any Facebook pages yourself, then this might not be very important to you. I, on the other hand, am a manager of seven different Facebook pages, including four in the Pocketables family, two that actually belong to my pets (so what?), and a page for a political cause that’s near and dear to my heart.
That’s a lot of pages to manage, and the regular Facebook app really wasn’t very helpful.
Luckily, Pages Manager is great, and the UI is designed in a way that should be familiar to anyone who has spent a lot of time in the regular Facebook app. Selecting the button at the top, left-hand side of the screen will display all the pages you currently manage, along with links for help, policies, settings, and a log out button.
Selecting a page from this list will take you to that page, which looks almost identical to the one in the main Facebook app, with one notable excetion: you can view page insights. As you can see, my beagle Bentley needs some more likes (so why don’t you help him out?).
The three notification drop-downs at the top of the page display your new fans; your messages; and wall posts, comments, and likes, respectively.
Your activity log allows you to see posts you’ve scheduled up to a year in advance, although it doesn’t look like you can actually schedule them from the app yet . You can also filter posts you see on your page, so only your own are displayed, or only posts from your fans. As you can see, it’s also really easy to update your page’s status and post photos.
One final feature that’s very nice is the ability to turn push notifications off until the next day at 8:00 a.m. In my limited testing so far, push notifications don’t seem to be working reliably, but they didn’t work right in early versions of Facebook’s main app, either. I would like to see more granular settings in future updates, such as the ability to turn off notifications all together without having to sign out.
Overall, I’m happy to see that this app is released, but I’m also starting to wonder how many side apps Facebook is going to make, instead of just rolling all of these features into the main app. In any case, this is definitely one I see myself using in the future, so hopefully it will get even better and more powerful soon.
Download: Google Play
