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Facebook Brand Timelines: 6 Big Changes

Today Facebook announced to brand marketers the world over that, within the month, everything they knew about fan Pages on Facebook would be overturned. While you get your brand ready for the new Timeline format, here are six important changes to keep top-of-mind.

1. Updated Look and Feel

What’s new: The format of Timeline for brands is quite similar to Timeline for personal profiles. It employs a cover photo at the top of the Page, and the Page is separated into two main columns by a dividing line, which represents the passage of time. This format provides brands with new options for self-expression: They can outline their corporate history with milestones (such as product launches, store openings, etc.) to construct a narrative for their audience.

Recommendation: Milestones present an important and dramatic opportunity to educate the public, humanize the brand and remove a perception of corporate anonymity. Our analyses of Page engagement have continually shown that brands posting content that depicts behind-the-scenes activities, exclusive updates or promotions encourages user interactions and promotes higher engagement rates. Using interesting milestones to craft the story of the brand over time (and updating the Timeline with new milestones as they happen) can help to stimulate conversations around major achievements.

2. Reduced Tab Visibility

What’s new: The new Timeline format does not have the left-side panel of links, which could include hundreds of different tabs. While applications still exist, they’ll display differently, in rectangular panels underneath the cover photo. The width of the Timeline and the space allocated for native apps like Photos means that only three tab panels are viewable at any given time. To see more, users must expand the tab panel by clicking a drop-down box.

Recommendation: For marketers, this major change means that the three above-fold tab apps need to be considered carefully — this will be one of the first things users see when interacting with your brand on Facebook. Brands will want to switch up which tabs are visible “above the fold,” according to current company objectives or project popularity. A good Page analytics tool will be useful for determining which tab to promote on a day-to-day basis.

3. No Default Landing Page

What’s new: With the new Timeline Page format, you will no longer be able to set a default landing Page, a favored feature for many savvy brands. The option was one of the primary ways to control the first (branded) impression a user encountered. Since there are no more tab Pages, there is no way to set one as a default. This will drastically change user impressions when they first visit a brand’s Timeline Page.

Recommendation: You will need to apply new and careful attention to all the top messages in the Timeline, as they will be the first objects seen by visiting users. Likewise, Facebook ads for brands will become ever important, as ads will be one of the major ways brands on Facebook can control a user’s experience. Setting up an advertising campaign for a Facebook promotion or new application will be the only way to guide new and clicking users directly to that application (as landing on this Page cannot be achieved by default).

4. New Way to Feature Content

What’s new: One major new feature that marketers will love is the ability to “pin” certain posts to the top of the Timeline. Similar to marking a blog post “sticky,” so that it remains at the top of a blog for a specified period of time, pinning a post to the top of Timeline allows it to precede any other content. A pinned post is distinguished by a small, orange flag. Brands can pin only one item at a time, and the pinned item then exists in two locations — as the top item on the Timeline itself, as well as within its chronological place. Once unpinned (which happens automatically when a new item gets pinned, or the item has been pinned for more than seven days), the post remains in the chronology of Timeline posts, but there is no visual history that it was pinned in the past.

Recommendation: Since you can no longer create a default landing Page, pinning items to the top of the Timeline will become every marketer’s go-to strategy for highlighting new and interesting content. We will begin to see savvy brands design posts specifically to be pinned, whether images, a well-designed call-to-action, a statement about brand value, or a message calling for the user to click one of the tab panels under the cover photo.

5. Current Tab Content and Applications Become Outdated

What’s new: The new Timeline layout displaces Facebook’s existing Page tab configuration and replaces it with a new 810-pixel layout. As a result, existing Page tab content will look centered in the middle of the 810-pixel layout without any adjustments. All applications that remain on a brand’s Page will need new application icons (the new dimensions are 111×74).

Recommendation: The most pressing updates for brands will be to update the images and tab functionality of the above-fold two apps. As these are the first tabs users will see, they will likely be the first to be interacted with, or entirely ignored if not optimized for the new experience.

6. Private Messages Between Brands and Users

What’s new: Finally, brands will be able to send and receive private messages with users. This allows for much deeper consumer interaction, and will also enable Page managers to take extended customer inquiries off the Timeline and into a private message.

Recommendation: Be mindful of noise in the Timeline. Since the real estate allocated to each post depends on how engaging it is or how much interaction it has received, it can be easy to clutter your Timeline with customer inquiries. When these inquiries can be better serviced in a more one-on-one manner, reach out to the consumer with a private message and resolve her question. It’s a good opportunity to yield both a happy user and a clean Timeline.

Timeline for brands will certainly shake things up for social media marketers who seek to make an impact on Facebook. One thing is for sure though: The way content is shared and viewed within a Timeline Page is incredibly important. Brands that constantly create engaging updates and share important milestones will stay at the forefront of users’ attention. Create and rotate new apps for engagement, pin relevant and timely content, and update the feed with user-friendly dialogues to stay relevant in this new space.

Will you or your company do anything differently? Share your thoughts…

From Mashable

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Small business marketing tips for Facebook

26 Feb

With 845 million users, Facebook has become an increasingly useful tool for brands, and it’s important to have a strong presence on the social network.

Whether your brand is fully established or just starting out, launching a marketing campaign can seem overwhelming. But, it doesn’t have to be a timely or expensive process. There are several small and simple things you can do for your brand on Facebook. In fact, some of these marketing tactics are used by the biggest brands in the world.

1 | See if Your Vanity URL Is Available

Before you launch your brand presence on Facebook, you need to make sure that your vanity URL is available — and that it’s simple and easy to remember.

Rather than going through the time consuming process of manually figuring out what’s available and what’s not, use a simple but powerful service called Name Vine. It checks domain names, Facebook and Twitter extensions in a matter of seconds to see if your desired vanity URL is available.

2 | Use a Third-Party Platform to Distribute Social Content

Copying and pasting content, logging in from one social media network and logging out from another can be a time consuming task — but it doesn’t have to be. If you’re looking to push content to Facebook and other social networks, you can benefit from using a tool like Posterous (which Marketspan customise for our clients blogs) which allows you to publish once and distribute everywhere. You can integrate your Facebook Page, Twitter account, LinkedIn profile and other social networks — all within one easy-to-use interface.

3 | Apps worth investment

For small and medium-sized businesses, social media budgets are nowhere close to those of global brands, which can afford multiple custom applications and promotions on Facebook. However, large budgets aren’t required to launch a lot of the basic applications seen on Facebook.

Services such as Marketspan’s QR stickers & Facebook Landing Page offer (All for £250 +VAT), provide the kind of application that most businesses need.

4 | Find out when to post

If you’re looking to see when your fans engage the most - you can utilize a third-party service called Edgerank Checker.

This time-saving application grades your fan page and determines the following key factors:

Most effective day of the week to post content
Popular keywords that drive engagement
What type of media is best for your audience
How often to update

5 | Provide local content

Nobody wants to visit a Facebook Page with an enticing offer, only to learn that it’s not available in their region.

When you have would like to target a specific city, Facebook allows you to make status updates for users with that location. Facebook also allows you to choose a language for users who have a different language to English as their default language – allowing only those with that language to see the post.

1. Click on “Custom”

2. A pop-up will come up that will look like this:

3. Once you’ve entered your specific targeting information, you can hit “Okay” and proceed with your status update, geared for that specific audience. It’s local and relevant for those language settings selected.

We hope these tips work – but as alwasy if you need help, then Contact Us

Original post by Amex Open Forum

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Are you using a Facebook profile or a Fan Page?

2 Feb

Are you using Facebook to promote a business or a cause? Then you need to make sure you’re using a Facebook Page rather than a Facebook profile. The good news is that Facebook allows you to easily migrate your personal profile into a Facebook Page.

Fan Pages are different since they are run by organisations, businesses and public figures and they use the ‘Like’ option to gather their followers because they are not allowed to befriend personal users and send them personal messages. They can talk to their fans, but have a limited access to their personal data. These distinctions were intentionally created to differentiate the public and private spheres on Facebook. However, fan Pages also have great benefits for businesses and organisations:

They’re allowed to have limitless fans (personal profiles are restricted to 5,000 friends)
Can be redesigned to your own needs
Offer a wealth of analytics and stats

Here are the easy steps to migrate your Facebook profile to a Facebook Page:

First thing to do is backup your current profile. This is very important! Facebook will download all your wall posts, friends, pictures, events, profile info, etc. and zip it up into a large file. The process takes Facebook about 1 hour to run, depending on the wealth of data you have stored on your Facebook account. To run a backup, click on account -> settings -> download your information
Once you have received an email from Facebook with your .zip file of stored information, follow this link to the migration page
Select your business type from the six possible options and fill out the short information prompts and hit “Get Started”
You will then be directed to your new business Page. You will notice that your profile image will be imported from your previous profile but your fan total will be listed as “0”. Don’t worry, when you refresh your Page, you will see the number quickly rise to your pre-existing fan/friend base

For all the details on how to switch your profile, check out the Facebook Help Center. We highly recommend that you read the details carefully because once you convert you can’t reverse the process.

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What the World’s Biggest Websites Looked Like at Launch – it all starts somewhere!

23 Dec

Google. While the company’s design doesn’t seem to have changed a whole lot, its services and capabilities sure have. Created by Stanford PhD students Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google officially launched Sept. 4, 1998. The interface was so simple because the founders didn’t know HTML and were looking for a quick design.

YouTube. The video sharing website that brought us hits like “Charlie bit my finger” and “Sneezing panda” first launched in February 2005 with a practically empty interface and no evidence of videos. The first video uploaded to the site was created by one of YouTube’s founders, Jawed Karim, and was titled “Me at the Zoo.” It was a 19-second clip of him in front of elephants at the San Diego Zoo.

Facebook…or should I say Thefacebook…was created by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004. As the original interface indicates, the site was only available for Harvard University students, which eventually expanded to today’s 800 million users across the world. The interface also featured the image of a man’s face in the upper left hand corner, a digitally manipulated photo of Al Pacino.

Yahoo! An acronym for “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle,” Yahoo was the product of another Stanford duo, Jerry Yang and David Filo. In March 1995 the site was heralded as the first online navigational guide to the web. The original interface featured a simple search bar and hyperlinks to other websites, but soon became a sleek, personalized news website.

Amazon. The mecca of online shopping can trace its roots back to 1995, when it was primarily an online bookstore. Jeffrey Bezos named the site after the Amazon River. The original site contained small text and icons, which still informs its most recent design.

Twitter. This barely recognizable design was the first concept of co-founder Jack Dorsey back in July 2006. It featured the word “Twttr,” which was inspired by Flickr and SMS shortcode (which always includes five characters). Although the interface design has changed at least six times in the last five years, that hasn’t deterred its more than 100 million users.

MySpace. Launched in August 2003 as a competitor to Friendster, MySpace’s original design was pretty bland. When MySpace skyrocketed to popularity between 2005 and 2008, News Corp. bought the social networking site for $580 million. Although it holds the former title of most-visited site on the Internet, MySpace sharply declined in the past few years. The site recently sold to Specific Media and Justin Timberlake for $35 million.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Since the rise of the Internet in the ’90s, the web has shown no signs of slowing down. We’ve watched the birth and evolution of social media, e-commerce and online video entertainment.

It’s hard to imagine that the treasured websites we all use today were at one point just scribbles on a piece of paper. Seeing how far the world has come in terms of web design, where do you foresee us heading next?