Have you noticed Facebook rolling out any changes to the About section of your Facebook business page including a new ‘Story’ field? You may see different versions in terms of layout and the names of some fields. We’ve done a bit of research and testing to find out exactly what they are… Since there seems to be no advice from Facebook regarding what should go in this field and how many characters you should have.

One of the fields is particularly important since it should be optimised to make sure your Facebook page appears in search results. By this we mean you should include the key words/phrases that someone may use when searching for your type of business and location. This Facebook field is indexed by Google and means your Facebook page should appear in Google search results (along with your website if that is optimised too).

In recent times, before any field name changes, we have always advised clients to optimise the text in the SHORT DESCRIPTION field in the About section of their Facebook page. It is also a good idea to complete the LONG DESCRIPTION to assist visitors to your Facebook page (although remember not to just duplicate text from your website – do a variant of it to avoid being penalised by Google.)

What you need to know about the ‘Story’ field

If you are now seeing the new layout of the About page, the ABOUT field is the equivalent of the short description and the new STORY field is the equivalent of the long description. The short description character limit has always been 155 and the long description seems almost unlimited. However the short description character limit may have been lifted, in which case we recommend always putting the most important optimisation phrases first.

(Facebook is updating this page as we create this blog – we will update again shortly! You may even find that the ABOUT field has already changed to be called Short Description again within the new layout…)
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More free tips and advice 

We hope this has helped! For more handy tips on social media, including other Facebook posts, please see our blog and browse our blog categories. If you don’t want to miss future blog posts about marketing and social media, please sign up to our email newsletter (see right hand column). You can also follow us on social media – Facebook  Twitter  LinkedIn  Google+  You Tube  Instagram Snapchat.