A GUIDE TO FACEBOOK TIMELINE FOR BUSINESSES & BRANDS

Like it or not, changes are uh comin to facebook’s business & brand pages. TimeLine has finally rolled out for Brands and all this means is a whole new strategy is needed to keep your current audience, and gain the LIKE’s of your potential audience. As of Wednesday, February 29^th Brand pages can opt in for the new TimeLine features. The obvious changes are the new Cover Photo, the ability to edit & update without navigating to a separate page and of course highlighting milestones such as important status updates that you may want to stick around for a bit longer than the other post’s. 

TimeLine definitely makes pages more social. Visiting a page you instantly see the amount of your friends who have liked the company, along with the posts of your friends relevant posts that are public. Local businesses have their virtual map appear in the row of apps below the cover photo.

Starring an important message allows you to highlight a post, which makes it twice as big as the others, and more visually appealing so eyeballs not only view but also actually read or watch your message. TimeLine has given us a much more colorful and cleaner way to navigate and make use of all of the admin features with an insightful panel, which is much simpler to use.  Here you will have features such as notifications, analytics, messages and even a HELP menu that really makes this transition a whole lot more comfortable. 

TimeLine’s new features really enable brands to tell a more engaging & transparent story to their current and potential audience. Viewers have a much easier job of finding a companies information by simply clicking the Info section, photos, apps and map that is all right below the cover photo “impossible to miss”.  Looks like President Barack Obama didn’t wait long to get his page buttoned up and accepted this drastic change to our new online presence. 

As with any change on and off line there will be a great amount of individuals that believe this to be a potential flaw, especially when it comes to brands that have yet to figure out how to provide engaging content. Although we are only able to tell our brands story from as far as the year 1000 some believe that this limits their complete story and history, I mean, is your brand really that old? If so Congratulations, you’ve beat the odds. With all of this being said, brands now have a great opportunity to get very creative with their facebook presence. Remember, first impressions will always be everything!.

Here’s the killing point in all of this though, pages no longer have the ability to welcome new viewers with its most widely used and loved default landing tab which was what non-fans were welcomed with when they visited a page before LIKE’ing it.  Businesses and brands used this powerful marketing feature which gave incentive to viewers on how, where and why one should click the LIKE button with special content such as coupons, contests, eBooks and much more. This required the consumer or viewer to LIKE the page for these promotions and incentives. 

Now that we aren’t told what to do and where to do it, we have to hope that the consumer actually knows where to find the application tab for these special incentives which will of course cost brands LIKE’s, email signups, entries to contest’s and various other key indicators.  That influential Landing Tab was really a great marketing tactic. We had a big influence on the behavior of theconsumer or viewer, which we no longer have other than effectively putting out great and engaging content.

TimeLine’s Cover Photo does allow us to enhance the branding process with out relying on third party apps but this cover photo comes with big restrictions.

What A Cover Photo Can’t Display:

1)   Calls To Action (C2A) “Like Our Page”

2)   Purchase & Pricing information such as “20% off” or “Download at www.SocialSmedium.com

Facebook is clearly cleaning up the way brands and consumers interact with one another. Social Business has changed the way we engage with our current and potential audience, the art of story telling is now the future of keeping your consumers engaged. A man by the name of Scott Cook once said, “A brand is no longer what we tell the consumer it is – it is what consumers tell each other it is.” When we learn to realize that this is absolutely correct, we will then as marketers learn to put ourselves in the consumer’s shoes and step away from the spam sammiches.

A few things to keep in mind that have changed

1)   Default landing tabs are long gone

2)   Tabs are still there & wider than ever at 810px

3)   Consumers can now message brand pages directly “Talk about customer satisfaction”

4)   TimeLine will be in full effect come March 30^th 2012 “How ya like them apples”.

5)   You get a maximum of 12 apps so strategically place your important ones first

6)   Cover Photo specs are 850px W x 315px L

I included as much as necessary for this Introduction to Facebook’s TimeLine for Brand Pages however will be following up in the week to come with a Users Guide to Facebooks TimeLine Features for Brand Pages.