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Executive Brie!ng Series: Facebook timeline for brands

Prepared by:

Kristy Bolsinger Senior consultant, Ant’s Eye View

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Executive Brie!ng: Facebook Timeline for Brands

Facebook Timeline for brands has three very clear themes for companies to consider: 1.  Brand your page 2.  Highlight what matters 3.  Manage everything in one place There are elements of change to the Timeline that roll up to these higher level themes that are covered in this Point-of-View including: apps, cover, pinned posts, administration, milestones and more. Timeline increases the opportunity for companies to dramatically and visually brand themselves on Facebook in ways they never could before with the addition of features such as cover photos and expanded story layouts. The level of engagement brands will be able to have with their consumers on Facebook now is nearly limitless with the addition of admin features like Activity Log and the addition of private messaging functionality. Overall – the change to Timeline for brands is one directed at increasing engagement between brands and their fans and consumers while allowing companies the freedom and power of visual branding and expression. This brie!ng attempts to outline some of the highlights and most important points of consideration for brands

An overview of changes

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Executive Brie!ng: Facebook Timeline for Brands

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Visual branding considerations

One of the most obvious and dramatic visual changes to Facebook brand pages within the Timeline feature set is the addition of a “cover image.”   The image used for your cover image is designed to be “an aesthetically pleasing photo, not a billboard for advertisements.” This is an opportunity to showcase your brand values, personality, and even culture. To promote this behavior, Facebook has placed rules around what can and cannot be embedded here.

Facebook covers cannot include: •  Calls to action, including arrows pointing to a Like button

or apps •  Suggestions to Like, Share, or reference other Facebook

actions •  Pricing, sales, discounts •  Contact information of any kind

Facebook covers should: •  Work in concert with the pro!le images, which must now

be square •  Ideally be 851 x 351 pixels

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Executive Brie!ng: Facebook Timeline for Brands

Pinning Brands can now pin a piece of content to the top of their wall so regardless of interactions it will remain at the top of the page. You can see here in this Starbucks example that this has been “pinned” by their admin as denoted by the little orange/yellow #ag on the top right. A pinned post will remain there for 7 days, after which it will return to the date it was posted on the Timeline. Unfortunately, user posts are not eligible for pinning – only content shared by the brand page itself. Use this functionality to showcase important news from you, or speci!c promotions you want to highlight. At this time you cannot geo-target (or otherwise) this content, but stay tuned. This seems a logical next iteration to this feature. Friend activity One of the most exciting changes Facebook has made to the brand pages via Timeline is the Friend activity section. This lives on the top right hand side of Timeline and is designed to increase the relevancy of the page for each visitor. The Friends module showcases how many of a users friends have also liked that page and a selection of those avatars in addition to a recent posting from a friend.

Content considerations

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Executive Brie!ng: Facebook Timeline for Brands

Apps In the past brands could create rich application like tabs (a.k.a., custom tabs, iFrame apps, canvas aps, pages, and landing pages) and direct visiting traffic accordingly as if it were a landing page. However, with the addition of Timeline, Facebook has changed how these tabs are represented and accessed. Brands will not be able to direct traffic to the tabs (now known and treated as apps). Visitors will access the apps only by !rst visiting the brands page. Brands can highlight up to four apps using the modules just below the cover image. This includes Photos. This space can expand to showcase more apps (up to 12) but only four will be visible by default. You can see here where the Starbucks apps are expanded, you can see eight rather than the !rst image where there were only four. Brands can control which apps show up and in what order with the exception of photos (photos will always be the !rst ‘app’). The new apps and thumbnail images are now larger and wider. The thumbnail that visually represents each app needs to be custom developed to !t the new speci!cations: 111 x 74 pixels

Story layouts Where content could some times go missed due to Edge Rank, the new updated Story Layout helps give some added visibility to content. As pictures and content are uploaded they are splashed across the width of the timeline and displayed beautifully. It is more important than ever to ensure that as often as is appropriate your content contains captivating imagery and/or video. This will help to ensure your visitors will be drawn in and ultimately engage with your content.

Content considerations

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Executive Brie!ng: Facebook Timeline for Brands

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Content considerations

Milestones If you are familiar with how the Timeline works for personal pages then the concept of a Milestone should be somewhat familiar. A milestone is just that. A point along the brand’s journey that is important or pivotal. Just as individuals can, brands can now also designate points in time that were important or pivotal by designating it as a Milestone. While there are things that may be obvious for brands to designate as milestones (i.e., when the company was founded, change in brand name, !rst international release, etc) there may be other relevant uses. Facebook has not put any hard and fast rules around this feature – ultimately giving brands a fair amount of #exibility in adoption.   

Important milestone details •  You must use the Timeline “as a page” in order to see

the Milestone update option •  Milestone content is marked with a blue #ag image •  Milestone content can include a date, location, image

and story (or caption) •  Milestone content is full width, similar to highlighted

content •  Milestone content will create a date link in the right-

hand sidebar of the Timeline

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Executive Brie!ng: Facebook Timeline for Brands

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Administration considerations

Admin panel With this new iteration of Facebook, the administrative functions continue to improve. All of the page admin features have been centralized, and some functionality has been moved all together.   You can !nd the new updated admin panel at the top right of your page above the actual timeline. The admin panel provides snapshots of page noti!cations, new messages, new likes and insights.

Messages This new feature is one of the few Facebook has made optional. Brands can choose to hide this feature if they like, but when enabled it is displayed directly above the ‘Like’ button. It will allow users of a page to privately message, directly, a brand page. The customer service opportunities with this feature are fairly remarkable.

Activity log Because of the way in which Timeline is set up, administrators cannot scroll through a page and see all user activity in chronological order. Some of that content may not show up at all in fact. The Activity Log is the tool Facebook has added to help solve this problem, and likely many more. The tool is designed to aid in engagement and moderation.

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Executive Brie!ng: Facebook Timeline for Brands

Sources facebook.com/starbucks Facebook.com/nike Socialfresh.com/fb4

More information Kristy Bolsinger Senior consultant kristy@antseyeview.com

It seems that Timeline has opened up a number of doors for brands to engage with their consumers as well as visually brand themselves and creatively express their unique value proposition. There is also a lot of work to be done to ready your brand page for this transition.

Cover photo A cover photo must be chosen in the dimensions given. This is an opportunity to extend a brand’s visual impact. This can, and should be rotated on a regular basis to keep the content fresh and the visitors interest piqued. Apps All rich-tabs will be/must be converted to apps by the deadline imposed by Facebook (March 30, 2012). Thumbnails will also need to be developed to represent the apps below the Timeline.

Measurement All reporting and measurement dashboards should be revisited to ensure the data source and data destination are still in alignment. (Real-time data is purportedly coming to the admin panel soon!)

Engagement Consideration must be given to engagement and moderation operational work #ows. The addition of the activity log and the private messages both increase the level of engagement potential, but also change the work #ow for individual employees who are involved in day-to-day operations.

Content strategy Because so much of the new Timeline is around story telling with a high level of importance being placed on visual imagery, thought needs to be given to current content strategy and how to best leverage this new potential. Overall, the new Facebook timeline has opened up incredible opportunities for story telling and consumer engagement. The ability to communicate directly with customers combined with increased access to data, enable brands to grow and deepen the relationships with new and existing fans.

Summary of changes