Facebook Introduces Timeline for Brands
Written by 5ivecanons Staff
Facebook has dropped a bombshell on everyone with brand pages. Turns out, it’s not as bad as some were making it out to be.
The changes actually improve the way brands connect with users. Here’s how to take advantage of the changes:
User Experience
Timeline has changed the way users can view personal history on facebook, and now they’ll get the same insight into your brand. Every post you’ve ever updated on Facebook for your brand is now content that users can view.
This is where brand engagement meets storytelling. You can restructure your posts to tell the story behind your brand. Even if you’re company was formed in the early 17th century, Facebook will allow you to post about it.
They’ve introduced brand milestones and highlighted posts that increase the size of an event within your timeline. Above is an example of a milestone, from the day our agency opened its doors.
Pinned Updates
Facebook has also introduced a new way of organizing posts to give brands the ability to pin content to the top of the timeline. This gives brands the ability to keep content above the fold, instead of losing them below a multitude of status updates and wall posts.
So, what do all of these changes do to your marketing strategy? What happens to the apps and landing pages? Well, apps live on. In fact, they now get their own uncluttered canvas page where ads and additional content are removed.
Landing tabs are gone, however. Landing pages once gave brands the chance to capture users up front before giving them access to the wall, but timeline has changed all of that. The engagement strategies that were successful before need to be tweaked to fit the new Facebook.
Personalization
Two more changes to discuss and we’re done here, people. Facebook released private messaging from brands to users. Now if a user has questions, they don’t need to post a public wall update. They can do it privately.
Facebook will restructure brand timelines to personalize the content for each viewer. For example, you’ll see your friend’s check-in at a restaurant in the restaurant’s timeline because that user is in your network. Users that aren’t friends with them won’t see that check-in. Instead they’ll see their own version, depending on their network’s engagement.
Finally, managing your brand’s page insights has gotten a whole lot better. You can track likes and people talking about your brand, as before, but now you can track downstream lift and progression of engagement to see how far your brand messaging can reach in social. You are able to track how many users are liking your page in response to others liking your page. This transforms the way we can calculate ROI in terms of branding and can quantify social engagement for our campaigns.
Check out all the archived video from the official Facebook announcement and breakout sessions from the February 29 FNC.
Questions, comments, concerns? Leave them on our Facebook timeline or give us a call. 904.372.4603.
