It’s 2012 and life isn’t lived near a PC… or at least not all the time. Knowing that, Facebook just released their Pages iOS app into the wild, thus freeing page managers from their laptops and allowing them to take their Liking, posting, and commenting on the road.

We tested out the app and it’s pretty great. You can go snag it here right now.

The user experience is exactly the same as if you were using the Facebook app as a normal user, so it’s not like you have to learn a whole new interface. There are definitely some differences, though, which we’ll walk you through.

Getting Started

Once you download the app, you’ll be directed to log in, which involves going to FB to authorize the app. Once completed, you’ll be taken to the main screen. From here, you can post updates and photos, as well as seen everything that’s on your wall. There’s even a filter so you can filter to things you’ve posted, posts by others, or both.

Notifcations (likes, comments, etc.) show up under the same notifications icon they show up under in the standalone Facebook app. Clicking them takes you to the content, where you can even delete and block users via the app.

The menu button takes you to a side panel where you can choose a couple things: Insights (which are light weight, but we'll take a look in a second), Admins, and your other pages (assuming you manage additional pages).

Insights are definitely lightweight, you can you quickly glance at your top-level metrics in order to get a general idea of Page health.

We'll continue checking in on this and update if/when iPad and Android versions become available. Until then: happy mobile page managing!

UPDATE 5/21/2012 8:56 PM

We've been messing around with the app and found a couple things while posting (this story actually). First, you don't get a link preview when you paste a link in the status update. Second, it doesn't seem to like shortened links that much (isn't pulling images when the post populates in the Newsfeed). Third, since you can't see the link/image preview, you're stuck with having the link in the status update text - which we think is just kind of bush league.