Facebook announced today that brand Pages are getting a mandatory design overhaul, which will go into permanent effect on March 30th. But fear not, community managers! You’ll have a full month, starting today, to test the design in Facebook’s preview mode.

The new Pages should look familiar to users who have already jumped on the profile timeline bandwagon, as the redesign will capture key features of the timeline ethos. As Facebook designer Sam Lessin told VentureBeat, “We’ve seen that most businesses have a core group of loyalists, but those loyalists also have friends,” he said. “We’ve made it easier for people to connect with a business through the lens of their friends… It’s a much more personalized experience.”

So what changes will the redesign bring? We’ve listed the most important ones, after the jump.

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In conjunction with EyeTrackShop, Mashable released a study today documenting what elements of a Facebook brand page users tend to look at most. Information like this is key to building a successful brand page that encourages community engagement.

The team at Mashable found that the Wall–particularly the first few posts on the Wall–garners the most eye attention from fans, indicating that valuable fan interactions as well as interesting post content are key to keeping a fan’s attention. According to Mashable, “The 30 participants who viewed top Facebook brand pages almost always looked at pages’ walls first — usually for at least four times longer than any other element on the page.”

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Months after kicking brands off of Google+, Google on Monday welcomed brands back onto their social network.  A land grab ensued, and within an hour or two of Google pushing out the new brand pages, almost all major news organizations (and many, many smaller ones) had created brand pages. Being an early adopter on a social media platform seems to be key to getting lots of followers, so there was no delay here.

So far, most news organizations are using it in a similar way to how they use their Facebook pages — posting articles, asking questions of followers, etc. But it will be interesting to see how they use some of the features that are unique to Google+ — like hangouts and the ability to edit posts after they are posted (which can be used as a liveblog, among other ideas). For inspiration, take a look at this post from July about how Sarah Hill of KOMU-TV in Missouri uses Google+. (That station quickly joined today.) Read more