Facebook Timeline for Brands: Overview & Five Suggestions

As the March 30^th deadline approaches for businesses to update their Facebook brand pages to the new Facebook Timeline, marketers are busy trying to figure out how to best utilize the new layout of their profile pages to advance their social media marketing campaigns. I’ve already helped two organizations in the conceptual redesign of their profile pages and I thought I’d write a blog post to list some of the take-aways from our brainstorming sessions. Hopefully these suggestions can alleviate some of the pain points for businesses that are distressed over this transition.

1. The Cover Photo:

The Timeline based Facebook profile features a landscape oriented cover photo (suggested size is 851 x 315 pixels). For businesses, the cover photo provides an opportunity to express the tone and mood of their brand and their timeline profile page. While businesses can customize the cover photo to their liking, Facebook has prohibited specific promotional tactics such as calls to action for their customers (e.g. you can't ask followers to "like" or to click on certain tabs).

Brand managers should use the cover photo as a dynamic space to set first impressions for their products and services, and facilitate the right tone for an opening conversation with their future customer.

Example: I really like how Nissan has incorporated a really simple but powerful branding message “Our Most Innovative Year”. It gets people wanting to come back for the "reveal".

2. Milestones on the Timeline:

Since the Facebook Timeline changes the default profile page from a list of the most recent updates to a complete summary of an organization’s growth or its brand’s evolution, businesses should include events and achievements that symbolize various chapters in their development. This is especially important for what Facebook terms “Legacy Brands”, i.e. those brands that have decades of historical data that can be featured on the timeline.

In formulating the motif for a timeline, businesses should attempt to engage users through interactive rich media. The timeline should feature more than just status updates, and include photos, videos and location information where relevant.

If done right, the timeline should improve the stickiness for the profile page by allowing current and potential followers to scroll easily through the high points of a business – eventually creating more brand affinity.

Example: Check out Subway’s Timeline starting in the 1960s with the first use of the name ‘Subway’. 

3. Custom Tabs

Facebook’s older interface for business pages featured default landing pages that were invariably used for marketing campaigns and sales promotions. As a major change for many brands, the new Facebook Timeline will no longer allow directing visitors to custom landing tabs.

That being said, businesses can now select which of their tabs (icons) are displayed under the cover photo. These tabs provide the opportunity for businesses to feature the strongest aspects of their Facebook presence – whether it is stories or pictures from their customers, other content pages, or business-specific apps.

Brand managers should customize this space rather than accepting the default order of the tabs/icons along with the default fill images for these tabs. Positioning the tabs and using custom images should be considered to improve the look and feel of the timeline.

Example: Custom app images such as those created by Fanta offer a rich visual interface for the timeline.

4. Pinned Posts

To improve the visibility of selected content, brand page administrators can “pin” a post to the top of their Timeline. Pinned posts can remain at the top of a timeline for up to seven days. They can offer a useful means to broadcast critical information to followers as well as a mechanism to direct fans to contests and other promotions.

Example: Check out Starbucks’ pinned post publicizing its “Global Month of Service”.

5. Highlighted Posts

In addition to pinned posts described above, brands also have the opportunity to highlight important posts from their timeline. Clicking the star at the top right side of the post will increase the size of the post and make it span the width of the timeline, rather than just one column. This will garner more attention and make it very hard for followers to miss. Along with pinned posts, this feature allows brands to position their marketing and social campaigns front & center... literally :-)

Example: Oxfam USA uses a highlighted timeline post featuring a video that introduces the charity to its Facebook page visitors:

Hopefully this quick introduction to the Facebook Timeline for businesses will help you with your own transition to the new profile layout. While change is always painful, it is also inevitable, and there are benefits to be gained through new features and functions that weren’t available earlier. Some businesses have already started reporting improvements in their brand page engagement.

Have you already made the change-over? What are your thoughts? Please let me know in the comments section below, or fire me a tweet with your feedback on this article.

Business Analytics Digest

I started a bookmarks list for Business Analytics: http://www.diigo.com/list/informatician/business-analytics

Prominent themes that I've caught up on this month include maturity models for business analytics, real-time business intelligence, and collaborative decision making.

Tag Cloud for Business Analytics Digest (August 2011)

Social Media & Enterprise 2.0 Digest

I created a bookmarks list for Social Media & Enterprise 2.0: http://www.diigo.com/list/informatician/social-media

Prominent themes that I've caught up on this month include best practices, adoption frameworks, technology and strategy roadmaps for various types of social media and enterprise 2.0 initiatives.

Tag Cloud for Social Media & Enterprise 2.0 Digest (August 2011)

I-News? Sorry – Not Me

There’s no denying that traditional print newspapers are slowly becoming a thing of the past – but a “new” initiative by the MediaNews Group, the fourth-largest newspaper chain in the U.S., seems all primed to take us even more into the past… say around 1939.

According to a recent article in the NY Times, the MediaNews Group is planning to test market its new idea of having household readers print out their personalized newspapers at home using a proprietary printer. The company has trademarked the term Individuated News (I-News) to refer to the media-delivery system, and it will be testing these systems with the Los Angeles Daily News this coming summer.


Actually, this is not the first time such an experiment is being conducted. Check out this web page on Modern Mechanix - in 1939, radio fax units were tried out in homes to allow people to receive news through radio signals and have their bulletins printed at home on a continuous sheet of paper.

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I don’t know about you, but I don’t see this specific idea as a solution to the woes of the media empires trying to protect and hopefully boost their readership and revenue through innovative means. I suspect most of us would not want to have a printer at home dedicated to printing newspapers.


Personally, I see the short to medium term future of newspaper readership in the use of portable electronic readers such as the Amazon Kindle and the Sony e-Book Reader devices. flip between articles, making it faster and easier to browse and read the morning paper. In fact, the Kindle already offers several user-friendly features for newspaper readers such as ta flip page modality for reading articles just like paper versions of news papers, and moreover, the ability to bookmark, clip and save articles for later reading. The truth is that online news readers have already adopted various technologies and practices to aggregate and personalize the news they want from multiple sources through customized news feeds, and if mobility and portability are really important to the readers, they can get the same feeds through portable reader devices. There is great potential for newspapers in the active matrix electronic paper displays (EPDs) technologies which are fast improving in their capabilities and will soon be able to provide good color reproduction functionalities. What I don’t get is why don’t the media giants invest more seriously in technology projects which would allow them to reposition themselves more effectively in the print media value chain. By occupying positions as content creators, publishers and technology providers, they’d have a better chance at sustaining themselves over the long-term. Also, given the rapid adoption of web 2.0 by organizations, news media companies can position themselves as distributors of trusted research content, and offer this content via syndicated streams through certified APIs, web services, and enterprise mashups.

Book Review - Enterprise 2.0 by Niall Cook (2008)

Recently I had the opportunity to write a book review on Academici for a new book titled "Enterprise 2.0". I thought I just as well post the review here too. The original review appears here: http://www.academici.com/blog.aspx?bid=5676

CITATION

Cook, N. (2008). Enterprise 2.0: How Social Software Will Change the Future of Work. Hampshire, England: Gower Publishing Limited.

DETAILS

Author: Niall Cook
Title: Enterprise 2.0: How Social Software Will Change the Future of Work
Publisher: Gower Publishing
Publication Date: 2008
ISBN: 978-0566088001
Price: (US) $89.95

LINKS

• Link to Book Page on Amazon
• Link to Book Page by Author

REVIEW

Constructive applications of social software within a business context have garnered a lot of recent interest from practitioners as well as the research community. After an influential foray on the Internet, Web 2.0 technologies are being touted by many to bring significant benefits to organizations through their ability to facilitate agile collaboration and efficient information sharing across business functional areas.

Niall Cook’s Enterprise 2.0 is an opportunely timed book that provides a managerial overview of Web 2.0 technologies for businesses. At a time when organizations are starting to get serious about their Web 2.0 technology investments, Enterprise 2.0 can prove to be a useful and practical primer for getting a grasp on Web 2.0 technologies for the workplace. As social software applications such as blogs, wikis, social networking, collaborative tagging, social bookmarking and microblogging start to move beyond the pilot stages of implementation in many organizations, executives, managers, process owners, as well as technologists will need to know how to effectively implement and institutionalize these applications within the organization.

Recent industry trends also show that organizations that have been experimenting with social software technologies will most likely be looking at deploying them in the form of an integrated solution comprising of a multitude of tools and applications. This shift in the market from individual technologies to integrated solutions, accompanied with the aspiration for enterprise-wide deployment will require qualified strategy formulation, careful planning, and capable project execution. Enterprise 2.0 delves into sufficient details about each of these aspects of deployment and use of social enterprise software within the organization.

The discussion throughout the book is tied together with the 4 Cs framework (Communication, Cooperation, Collaboration, Connection) which the author initially introduces as a classification scheme for social software. Progressing through the book, it becomes clear though, that the 4Cs framework is not only a valuable analysis framework for conceptually making sense of the types of social software applications and their uses, but also for performing an assessment of the organization’s technology requirements and translating them into functional specifications. The examples and use cases provided with the 4Cs framework foster a better understanding of the potential gains and improvements that can be achieved through enterprise social software. The book’s managerial style narration and its references to various real world case studies make it easy for the discerning executive to comprehend the business case for investing in key social software tools and applications.

After helping the reader gain a sense of the business case for enterprise social software, the author moves on to suggesting a methodology for implementation and institutionalization of these technologies. Significant emphasis is placed on the adoption of technologies and overcoming resistance from staff. Toward this, the author aligns himself with the notion of accentuating user value over network value – i.e. drawing attention to the benefits of social software applications to individual users before talking about their benefits to the business. This can prove to be especially useful in getting the passive or less active users on board with the program. Beyond advice, the author proposes specific tactics to encourage user participation and speedier organization wide adoption by offering guidelines that can be adapted for different social and political cultures.

The last part of the book is dedicated to a review of the literature on enterprise social software. As an invaluable resource for the academic readers, this section provides a current review of terms and definitions related to the subject, as well as a summary of the conceptual treatise of enterprise social software found in seminal works.

To conclude this review, as organizations embark on projects to implement comprehensive enterprise software solutions that integrate multiple technologies into unified platforms, they need to rely on guidelines and recommendations from prior research, practitioner experiences, expert opinions, and lessons learned by others in their projects. Enterprise 2.0 provides a useful synthesis of these resources in the form of a discourse that will appeal to both the industry and the academic communities.

The Informatician - Blog Overview

Key Definitions:

Informatician: someone who practices informatics

Informatics: the art, science and human dimensions of information technology ; the interdisciplinary study of the design, application, use and impact of information technology



Subject Matter of the Blog:

My intention in starting this blog is to discuss and learn about current and upcoming information and communication technologies (ICTs) and their applications for public end-users as well as organizations.

By virtue of my own professional and academic pursuits, I am particularly interested in the discussing challenges and opportunities in the areas of Virtual Communities; Web Engineering ; Web 2.0 Technologies; Web Services; Social Media; Information Security; and Electronic Human Resources Management.

Orientation of the Blog Writer:

My philosophy as an informatician is fundamentally based on my conviction that the design and deployment of technologies is more than just a technical pursuit, and as informaticians, we strive to bring attention to the intricate relationship between technologies and their social and organizational context of use in real-world settings.

My own predilection as an informatician is at the intersection of management and sociology, and most of my work as an academic and an industry consultant has been in the areas of social informatics and business informatics.

Below is a visual depiction of how I think about informatics. Please note that this is purely my own viewpoint - you might have an different position on the same subject.

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