Facebook Timeline Guide by 7billion

FACEBOOK TIMELINE FOR BRANDS

MARKETER´S GUIDE

1. What is Timeline and Why Is It Important? 2. Key Features 3. Key Benefits 4. What Should I Do Now? 5. Examples of Timeline Pages

Contents

What Facebook Timeline for Brands is different in many ways from the original interface. It is a visually compelling way of engaging and connecting with your fans emotionally, through your brand’s milestones and historic background, the stories and highlights of your brand. It is essentially a storytelling virtual scrapbook that gives your brand a life that can be worth sharing to your fans.

Why It is important because it could involve changing your social media strategy with Facebook, not forgetting, it will be mandatory for every Brand page by 30th March 2012 to switch to Timeline.

What Is Timeline and Why Is It Important?

What Are The New Features To Take Note Of:

1. Cover Photo

Once Timeline is implemented, you will realize that your original landing page will loose focus. What you need, is to find a brilliant and bold image as your page’s Cover Photo. It is important to keep it in line with your brand image and resonate with your fans’ expectations. This will be visually more attractive and entitles more emotional engagement to your fans.

Note: Facebook explicitly states that “This space is not meant for promotions, coupons, or advertisements.” The Cover Photo should be 851 x 315px and the inset Profile Picture display is now 125 x 125px.

Key Features

1. Cover Photo e.g. Livestrong

Key Features

2. Custom Tabs

Tabs and Apps now appear directly under your Cover Photo with a maximum of 4 displayed. You can change the order of the tabs and the image of the tab displayed. Of course, you thus need to put the most important and crucial apps to your business, strategically under the cover photo.

Key Features

2. Custom Tabs e.g. Starbucks

e.g. Walmart

Key Features

3. Pinned Posts & Highlight

Pin posts: You can now choose to “pin” you most engaging post right on top of your page. This means these updates will remain at the top of your wall, for your choice of period of time (up to 7 days).

Tip: How about coming up with a weekly poll? Fan contest? Something engaging that keeps the fans coming back.

Highlight: If you haven't already experimented with this function, it is a very smart way of drawing your fans' attention to important posts updates. It enlarges the width to double the size of a specific post. Whether it be an image, a video or an offer, you can play around with it to your advantage. Just “star” it and you can, remove the highlight anytime as well.

Key Features

3. Pinned Post e.g. Red Bull

Key Features

3. Highlight e.g. Red Bull

Key Features

4. Admin Panel – Real Time Insights

One great feature of the new admin is that you can admin your Page without leaving the Page itself. The administration is displayed above the Page content.

In addition, Data on impressions, reach, people talking about this, clicks, video views, negative feedback and more will soon be available just 5-10 minutes after a post is published rather than two whole days later. This will teach marketers what content resonates most with their audiences, and give them the chance to immediately amplify the reach of a popular post.

Key Features

5. Fan Message

Fans are now able to send a message directly to you in private. This is beneficial if they are negative comments that you can settle and discuss in private. Of course, there are downsides, like an influx of messages to your admin panel. This is an optional feature you can turn off.

Key Features

6. Milestones and Life Events

The whole basis of Timeline is storytelling so what better way to do so, then to showcase your brand's milestones that dates back to more than a decade ago.

Key Features

6. Milestones and Life Events e.g. Starbucks

Key Features

1. Creating an Identity

With the new Cover Photo, there many ways for you to make the best out of it, in line with your brand image and in engaging your customers. It is 80% more engaging and entitles an emotional connection with your fans.

2. It’s like Story Telling

Facebook pages take a more storytelling position now rather than product selling. The new features of highlights, pinned posts, milestones and friend activity that appears differently on each fan’s page when they view your page; all these make the pages look beautiful, interactive where fans won’t feel that they are forced to like the page before being able to post their views or share their images. What fans will see, is organic engaging and sincere content by the brands. This will keep fans coming back.  

Key Benefits

3. Improved Management and Measurement

With the new admin panel, rather than sending admins to a separate interface, the new Admin Panel drops down and appears overlaid over Timeline when clicked. All the info about your reach, number of “Likes” and demographics of your fans are given in real-time. With this new feature, you can configure your settings, manage your posts and content, attending to any urgent negative comment whenever needed. This gives you great control to your content management and garner greater insights to what your fans really want.

Key Benefits

4. Increase Fans Engagement

This last and final point is important to all brands because without them, there is no you. The entire layout from the Cover Photo to the curation of events in Milestones, provides fans a much greater emotional engagement to your brand. As long as you know how to strategically position your posts, create suitable content and pick visually stunning cover photo and profile photos that resonate with your brand, with Timeline, you can improve your fans engagement.  

Key Benefits

You have up till 30th March 2012 before your Page automatically changes to the new Timeline layout and you may just have to end up making changes to your original Facebook strategy.

Hence, here are some first steps you can take before you roll out

Timeline for your brand.

What Should I Do Now?

1. Choose your Cover Photo (and maybe a new profile photo) that you think is not only visually appealing, but something that is engaging and relatable to your brand image.

2. Manage your Tabs Content. Decide which tabs should be kept on display directly below your cover photo. There is more space now for your apps when fans click it, so review your current tabs and see how you can best execute them, and decide which thumbnail images you wish to place on each tab.

3. Pinned posts and Highlights. It would be good going through which posts will be worth pinning and highlighting.

4. Admin Panel. It will be good going through the new features and you can choose how different admins see different things on the insights.  

What Should I Do Now?

5. Fan message inbox. Decide if you want fans to be messaging privately to your page, these messages will be directed to your admin. You probably need to respond effectively and quickly should there be influx of messages. So, do decide if this is a viable option for you. (if you’re a local or big business)

What Should I Do Now?

It’s not too late to act so do not worry!

Timeline is something we should thank for and embrace. We believe Timeline has the same underlying message as before it was introduced; that Pages are ultimately for building communities of people who are engaged in conversations and sharing stories.

Conclusion

Examples Cover Photos – Coca Cola

Examples Cover Photos – American Museum of Natural History

Examples Cover Photos – Walmart

Examples Cover Photos – Verizon Wireless

Examples Cover Photos – Macy’s

Examples Cover Photos – Subway (very good cover)

Examples Milestones – Ben & Jerry’s

Examples Milestones – Subway

Examples Pinned Posts – Verizon Wireless & Starbucks

Examples Pinned Posts – Macy’s

Calling for fans to be part of their Macy’s “story” on their Timeline

Examples Highlights – Toyota USA

Examples Highlights – Starbucks

For questions or further information, contact us at [email protected]

Thank you!