Written By
Peter Ghali, iContact’s Senior Manager, Product Management
Facebook Timeline is all about connecting to your audience in a whole new way. Timeline is about sharing your company’s story, its history, what your company is “living and breathing” today. There are a lot of changes, but for today’s blog post, we are going to focus on five changes to help you connect with your audience in a new way. This is the first part of a two-part blog post on the subject. The next blog post will dive into some best practices for Facebook marketing. Look for that very soon, and if you have questions, let us know, and we might include those answers in part two.
Five Key Changes
- Default Page – This is the big change that a lot of folks are talking about. With this change, Facebook users can no longer create a default page for visitors to go to. Facebook has stated that they want a consistent experience, and with Timeline, the page will be more about your brand’s story. While this will be challenging to some brands that want to control the experience a bit more, the reality is that there are a lot of positive changes that give marketers exactly that control.
- Apps – Before Timeline, Facebook marketers would add apps and pages to their Facebook presence, and they would appear on the left side of the page. Facebook has moved apps/pages to right under the cover photo and now limits pages to three visible apps. Facebook marketers will also have control over the app image and title. While these changes reduce clutter and give you more control over how the apps look and which ones appear, they also limit you to maximum of three apps/pages visible at one time without user interaction. The Photos page is in the first spot and cannot be moved.
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- About – Facebook marketers now have the “About” section in some very prime real estate, right under the profile picture. You’ll only get a couple of lines of visible text to encourage visitors to click the “About” link for more, so use that space wisely. The “About” section lets you tell the world some basic information about your business, such as your mission and a brief description.
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Clik here to view. - Admin View – With these new changes, Facebook has given page admins a quick “snapshot” view of what’s going on with their page. The Admin button is on the far right of the page, and it shows insights, notifications, private messages and more.
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Clik here to view. - Content Control – Timeline now lets you pin posts to the top of the page for seven days and lets you highlight posts. Highlighting a post makes it the entire width of the page. You can also create new milestones for your business.
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So if you are keeping count, so far that’s five changes; however, there are a lot more changes, so here’s one additional feature that I personally found interesting.
Competitive Insights – Visitors to a Facebook Timeline page can now see some basic insights about that page, such as “People Talking About This,” “Total Likes,” some basic demographic information about folks who are talking about the page and some trends. The trends are very insightful because focusing more effort on engagement than on the total number of likes can help you assess what tactics your competition is using to generate engagement.
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Conclusion
These changes are meant to create a common experience for visitors to your timeline. While there some changes may be frustrating, overall, these changes will help you connect to your fans and potential fans in new ways in a visually appealing manner. As mentioned earlier, there are a lot of changes, so here are some helpful resources:
- Facebook has a pretty great overview of the changes.
- Facebook recently held a webinar about these changes, which you may also find helpful.
If you are new to social media marketing or want more information, feel free to visit our social media marketing guide.
I hope you found this helpful. Let us know what your thoughts are on the new Facebook Timeline, and if there is anything you want to see in our upcoming part two.