Over the past few weeks, Facebook has undergone a major facelift. The social network has a new homepage design and status stream along with new management tools and organization pages.

While many users are frustrated and confused about the changes in the Facebook experience, these new features offer companies and individuals dynamic ways to manage and organize their professional and personal use of Facebook.At the end of 2008, social networks (Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc.) nudged past e-mail in popularity (according to statistics from Nielsen Online). The networks were originally designed for casual personal contact between friends, but as popularity increased and the user base expanded to include more professionals, these sites are adapting to offer better collaborative and social marketing services.

These business-oriented features are the most noticeable change to the ongoing Facebook redesign. The place where businesses and organizations can create a profile to market themselves and communicate with clients, colleagues, employees, and other business is called Facebook Pages. The network previously had a very simple, one-layer page. The feature has been redesigned to mimic the tab style already used on the Profile page. Basic company contact info remains in the left column under the logo, but all other info, photos, videos, applications and discussions have all been moved into tabs.

The biggest change and benefit to Pages is the inclusion of Wall and Publisher features found on the Home and Profile pages. The upgraded Publisher takes a cue from Twitter, and then offers more. The Publisher lets you comment, imbed links, images, videos and FB apps directly your Pages wall.

This new feature allows business to more quickly update their page and keep fans up-to-date, although it will take more involvement to keep the Pages fresh with content.

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Via Columbia Business Times