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The New Facebook Timeline – Part 2
By Sarah Giometti | Facebook
By Sarah Giometti | Facebook
This is it! The much-awaited, highly-anticipated, gotchya all twitter pated, second part to our review of the brand new Facebook Timeline that will become mandatory for Facebook pages at the end of March 2012. It’s comin’ peeps, so get excited and take advantage of the coolness!
In Part 1 of our review of the new timeline format, we discussed images. Images are a big, important part of Facebook. If you are a Facebook page admin you already know that, and Facebook now gives you some really cool toys in order to take advantage of that. Read Part 1 for the specifics.
The Like button is still important – so it’s still at the top of your page with your pretty new cover image. And those apps you’re using with the cool “fan-gate” or “like-gate” feature still work – so keep using them. You no longer have the non-fan landing tab functionality where you sent non-fans to your cool app tab and asked them to Like your page, but that doesn’t matter if you’re clever. All you really need to do is deep-link to your fan-gate app! What does that mean? Link your Facebook ads directly to your tab instead of your Facebook page, link to the tab from your blog, email . . . whatever you want. The other cool part of the new timeline is that your tabs now have room to stretch with a full 810 pixels in width. Oh yeah – a real good stretch – now doesn’t that feel better?
So you’re running a campaign, but you want to mix up your posts (rightfully so) so you don’t desensitize your fans to your campaign. That used to mean stressing about keeping a new campaign post close enough to the top of your Facebook page for visitors to easily find it. Well, gather ‘round folks ‘cause I have the solution to all yer problems right here! It’s called pinning. Choose any post, past or present, that exists on your page and mouse over it. You’ll see a star and a pen appear on the top right of that post. Click the pen to “Edit or Remove” the post and a menu will appear allowing you to “Pin to Top.” This will pin that post to the top of your timeline until you decide to unpin it or replace it by pinning a different post to the top. So run your campaign and pin the campaign details to the top of your timeline so visitors can easily find it for the duration of your campaign – how awesome is that? Of course, you’ll still want to schedule campaign update posts so they show in the newsfeed, but now you no longer need to stress about where they show on your wall.
Highlighting PostsRemember the star and the pen I just mentioned? Well, now that we know what the pen does, what about the star? The star will allow you to Highlight a particular post. Great – but what does that mean? When you highlight a post, it stretches itself across the width of your timeline. Now that post becomes more noticeable in your timeline! Oh the power . . . the power! Sorry, I got carried away there – play with this feature for various types of posts and see for yourself how it changes the look and feel of your page.
Private MessagesYou know how sometimes you want to send your friend a Facebook message instead of posting on their wall? Well, pages are people too! With the new timeline, your fans can send your page a message – now they’re not only your fans, but your “friends.” This adds another level of interaction between your brand and your fans – now they can talk to you in the way they feel most comfortable. You can access these messages from your new Admin Panel, along with your page notifications, new Likes, and Insights.
“Once upon a timeline, there was a brand that everybody Liked…” We’ve been calling them posts in this article, but that was just to help you with the transition. Now, updates to your page are called Stories instead of posts. Why? Because that’s the name of the game, baby! Facebook is about stories – and everybody has one. Your brand has a story to tell – so tell it. Updates get read (if you’re lucky), but everybody loves a story – and they love to share them. You’ll want to take a second look at your post strategy – stop blurting things out and start telling your story, and watch the crowd begin to gather around so they can hear it.
Let us help you tell your story and take advantage of the new Facebook Timeline with our social media marketing services!
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