Facebook’s reasoning for the change: "Just as you connect with friends on Facebook, you can now connect and communicate with celebrities, musicians, politicians and organizations. These folks will now be able to share status updates, videos, photos or anything else they want, in the same way your friends can already. You’ll be able to keep up with all of their activity in your News Feed."

This means brands have a fantastic opportunity to bring more awareness to their activities through the news feed. Some of you may update your status multiple times a day, and now fan pages also have a status box. When your brand has information to share you can go a step further than posting to the fan page by updating the status.
Brands are now in your Friends list and daily interaction. When users view their Facebook homepage, they see the page’s status update without even going to the fan page. Essentially this free marketing becomes another driver for the brand. Be cautious, as you don’t want to spam fans of your page with status updates. Updates to the page should be meaningful and provide value for your fans. Pages are destinations, not mini corporate sites.

According to Mashable, “Users aside though, there is one audience that appears to be benefitting greatly from Facebook’s new design: brands. Not only are Facebook Pages – the network’s competitive play against celebrity Twitter users – revamped and more social, but their updates are taking up space on member’s homepages, and in turn, as our data shows, driving lots of traffic and engagement for brands.”
Call it a Twitter rip-off, but Facebook has proven it can conquer the criticism. Read the full feature from Mashable “You Might Not Love the New Facebook But Brands Should” here.