Announced in the Facebook Marketing Conference yesterday, Facebook timeline will be available to your brand’s page coming March 30th. A select few were lucky enough to be a part of the pre-launch. Some of these brands include, Coca-Cola, Starbucks, Tide, and Ford Mustang. You may be feeling left out, but the good news is, you have a month to prepare your brand’s timeline. Take this time to really figure out how you want your page to look. For this month, you have the chance to preview the new layout. This gives you a chance to test out different designs and strategies for your brand.
What do you need to prepare?
Just like your personal timeline page, branded timelines will have a historical aspect to them. You will be able to tell your brand’s story through posts, links, photos, videos, and more. In order to be ready for March 30th you will need to gather the most important dates in your brand’s history. Along with dates, you should have:
- Photos that visually depict events
- Videos of original commercials for your brand
- Interesting facts that your consumers would want to read
- Any other memorabilia that connects your consumers to your brand
Change is good.
Although the look and feel of your brand’s Facebook page will be different, it will still have most of the bells and whistles as the original. You can say goodbye to fan-gate landing pages or welcome tabs. All users will land directly on the timeline. Don’t worry, your custom tabs will convert over, they will just live at the top of the page, rather than the left hand side.
With change comes a larger image. Your brand will have a cover image of 850 x 315 pixels and a profile image. Most brands use the profile image as a logo space and cover image as a story-telling visual.
Brand page administrators will have the ability to ‘star’ certain posts, which will expand the post across the page. If the post contains an image, this image will also expand and create a bigger impact on the viewer. See Tide example below:
Facebook Timeline will shed a new light on brands to consumers worldwide. It’s no longer about buying a soda or detergent. Now when consumers purchase these products they’ll know why Tide is called Tide and what year Coca-Cola started canning their soda. Facebook timeline for brands is definitely a turning point in social marketing. We can’t wait to see how you utilize the new layout.
Feel free to reach out for questions or discussions.
Authored by: Piper McEndarffer, Director of Social Marketing, Venda Inc.
