What Facebook’s New Timeline for Brands Means to Marketers
Leave it to Mr. Zuckerberg to pick Leap Day to announce the next big leap for Facebook. As marketers we’ve been biding our time wondering when the new timeline format would be introduced for brands. And the time is finally upon us. Or at least sometime within the month. If you thought you and your team were busy monitoring, creating content and trying to engage your fans, you can expect to get a whole lot busier as you throw everything you used to know about Facebook tabs and pages right out the window. Here are some high points of the new format:
Think Like a Magazine – the new timeline format is similar to the timeline format for personal pages, with a place for a big snazzy cover photo right across the top. This is your place to make a big visual connection with your fans. A picture is worth a thousand words, so choose wisely. And don’t wait to see how your previously formatted content will look in the new format. We’re here to tell you, it’s in your best interest to update your images and optimize your content for the new timeline experience.
Make the Most of Your Milestones – Before now, there may have never been an ideal opportunity to share your company history with your fans. From when you first launched the business, to adding product lines, to the hiring of key contributors, the timeline is a place for you to share who you are as a company and blur the lines of corporate anonymity. Because customer engagement goes up when we wield brand-specific content, such as behind-the-scenes footage or exclusive interviews, etc, consider incorporating these kinds of milestones as well.
Tab? What Tab? It’s true. That list of tabs on the left side of your page are gone. They’ve been replaced with rectangular panels that live beneath the cover photo. And there’s only room to see three of them at any given time. Think of these tabs as being “above the fold”. So you’ll want your most important content displayed here.
So long to the Welcome Page. Marketers won’t be able to define a default landing page anymore, so we’ll have to pay even better attention to those above the fold boxes.
Make Your Content Sticky. Ever wish you could make a post last longer? Now you can. Brands can pin one post at a time, allowing that post to stay anchored at the top of your page and precede any other content for a maximum of seven days or if you replace it with a newly pinned post. Here is one of the main ways that we as marketers can put a spotlight on new and engaging content.
Friends Make a Difference. To drive engagement, people will see stories about how their friends are interacting with your page throughout your timeline.
Guaranteed Reach. Facebook’s new Reach Generator tool dangles a tantalizing carrot in front of marketers by guaranteeing, for a price, that a company’s posts will reach 75% of its fan base within a given month.
Excited about the new Timeline format, but not sure how to tackle it for your brand? Let the social media experts at Customer Insight Group help you strategize your approach and engage your customers.
Filed under: Social Media Marketing