SOCIAL MARKETING GUIDE
The New Facebook® Pages
Brand Timeline:
What’s new?
•
What It Is and What It Means for Your Business
•
Anatomy of the New Facebook Pages Brand Timeline
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The Five Rules of Cover Photos, and How to Keep It Classy
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Best Practices: Starring and Pinning
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Quick Tips: How to Transition and Tell Your Story
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How Hearsay Social Helps
Facebook, the most popular social network in the world with nearly one billion users, announced at the first-ever Facebook Marketing Conference (fMC) that it would be transitioning brand pages to a new format based on timeline, allowing businesses to tell their story and connect with customers better than ever before.
Hearsay Social designed this guide to explain how the new Facebook Pages work and what these changes mean for marketers, including tips and best practices.
The guide will be covering the following:
What It Is and What It Means
for Your Business
True to Facebook’s mission to help people around the world “tell their life story” in a visually rich way, timeline launched for individual users last December. As part of this launch, a new generation of social apps like Spotify and Netflix allow users to seamlessly share their favorite tunes and films with each other in real-time. Additionally, stories appear side by side in the timeline to convey a more cohesive story. Lastly, but certainly not least, Facebook reserves the wide, open space at the top of the page for a unique cover image or backdrop of your choosing, perfect for self-expression.
Today, Facebook is bringing many of those same exciting elements to Facebook Pages. Social media marketers should be delighted by the changes. After all, what are
businesses but large groups of people with stories of their own? From the founding year to its first sale to other major milestones, organizations large and small have interesting stories to tell. And Facebook Pages will finally allow businesses to tell those stories in a compelling way.
Adjusting to a new look and feel can sometimes be confusing, but brands and businesses will find that timeline is a winning interface for interacting with fans. With timeline, marketing on Facebook is about building engagement more than ever before. It’s not about the hard sell; rather, it’s about creating original content and telling interesting stories, which more often than not occur at the local level.
Long before social networks, local representatives, agents, advisors, or franchisees connected with customers on the ground, in cities all around the world. Trust those local workers to be your best brand ambassadors. Cookie cutter messages don’t work anymore because social networkers see right through bland corporate messaging. That’s why it’s more important than ever for corporate brands to go local on social media. And, supported by Hearsay Social for Facebook Pages Brand Timeline, social marketers can do that with ease.
Pinned post
Profile Picture
About section
Apps
Timeline
Timeline
Cover Photo
Post
Facepile
Highlighted
post
1.
The cover photo is easily the most visually striking element of Facebook’s new brand pages, and you can bet that it’s the first thing any user will notice when they visit your page. Images uploaded as covers must be a minimum of 720 pixels wide. For more on the cover photo, see page 7.2.
Layered above the cover photo, the profile pictureis the second most important visual element of the timeline. Many brands will find this to be the perfect place for their logo, especially since this is the image which users will see alongside your posts in the News Feed. Your page name will appear in plain text to the right of this photo.
3.
Directly underneath the profile photo is the about section, where you can share basic information about your business, like founding year, contact information, location, and any other general info.4.
To the right of the about section are the app buttons, which replace tabs from the old Facebook Pages. Only four of these buttons are displayed automatically, and the first of these is reserved for Photos. The other three, and any others made visible by clicking a small arrow on the right, can be customized by the business page administrator.5.
The Facepile displays all the people who have liked your brand’s page. If a visiting user has friends who have already liked the page, then those users will be displayed in the Facepile first.Anatomy of the New Facebook Pages Brand Timeline
Summary
The number one thing to know with the new Facebook Pages is that this is the page users will see when they visit your brand on Facebook. No more fan-gating and no more auto-redirecting users to custom-created tabs. This is it. So it’s important to understand each individual component and the part each plays in the whole picture.
1.
2.
3.
4.
6.
Timelinea.
Post: The blank box on the top left side of thetimeline is an ordinary input box for you or your fans to post a status update, a photo, or any other content to share on the timeline.
b.
Just like on the Facebook Wall of old, the actual timeline displays the newest posts at the top and older posts as you scroll down. One nifty innovation of the timeline is that it displays fewer posts the further back in time you go, so that it’s easy to learn about a business’s whole history in one quick overview. Add compelling content from your early years for those users savvy enough to explore your past!c.
Pinning holds a status update, photo, or other piece of content of your choosing to the top of the timeline for exactly seven days. For more on pinning, see page 9.d.
Highlighting extends the width of posts across the timeline, making them more clearly visible as users scroll down the page. For more on highlighting, see page 9.The Five Rules of Cover Photos,
and How to Keep It Classy
“Powerful and full-featured,
yet simple.”
- Inside Faceboook
3.
No Facebook actions: On the old Facebook pages, a savvy social marketer might have created a landing page with a giant unmissable arrow pointing to the Like button. Before the user could see wall posts, photos, or any other type of content, they’d have to click the Like button and become a fan. Now, with Facebook action requests barred from the cover photo, you can’t coerce fans into liking your page.4.
No calls to action at all: You get the idea: no purchase info, no contact info, no Facebook actions... no calls to action at all. In a nutshell, Facebook wants you to keep it classy.5.
No lying: This should be a policy for every social marketer when interacting with customers on social media pages, but Facebook has outlined it as a specific rule for cover photos. Don’t promise anything you shouldn’t be promising. This coincides with advertising laws, so it should come as no surprise.Note: These are official Facebook rules.
1.
No purchase info: As tempting as the draw of F-commerce might be, the cover photo is a place to express the brand’s character and personality, not to jump right into a sales pitch.2.
No contact info: By the same token, Facebook wants to keep things clean and organized, so the rules explicitly prohibit contact info in the cover photo. This shouldn’t be much of a burden for businesses since the about section below the cover photo may include this information.Keep It Classy
So there you have, in plain English, five specific things that you cannot do with your brand new cover photo. So what can you do?
Express yourself!
Your business probably already has plenty of imagery and photography lying around just waiting to represent your brand on Facebook. The screenshot on page 4 showing off Hearsay Social’s Facebook Page is just one way of customizing your timeline.
Here are some more ideas for how big brands (and Hearsay Social customers) could use cover photo to express their company stories:
a.
Northwestern Mutual, one of the world’s top financial services companies, might want to use its classic pillar in the cover photo to convey to visitors an unmistakable sense of financial strength and security.b.
Farmers Insurance, provider of home, life, and car insurance, is lucky enough to have a highly visual brand ambassador: the Farmers Airship. They could leverage the airship as a fun and attractive welcome cover photo on their Facebook Page.c.
24 Hour Fitness, a fitness center chain with gyms all around the country, could feature photos of their facilities or people working out in thecover photo.
The sky’s the limit! Believe it: the more creative you get, the more users will enjoy visiting your timeline.
1.
Pinning a post causes it to stick to the very top of your timeline for exactly one week, whether you create new posts or not. If you want a particular photo or promotion to be highly visible to users that visit your business page, then pinning is the ideal way to do this. Marketers shouldn’t be dismayed by the rule (mentioned earlier in this guide) that prevents cover photos from displaying purchase or contact info. That’s because the pinned post is the ideal place for this kind of promotional content and advertising.Here are some examples of types of posts to pin:
a.
A clothing retailer posting a coupon for 25% off special items.b.
An insurance agent offering office hours to discuss quotes.c.
A financial advisor sharing his top 10 steps to prepare for retirement.Best Practices:
Pinning and Highlighting
2.
Highlighitng a post doubles its width across the page, making it much more visible as users scroll through your timeline. Because of the added visibility of highlighted posts, you’ll definitely want to save this feature for your absolutely best posts, and the ones that you don’t want any of your customers and prospects to miss. Here are some examples of the types of posts to highlight:a.
A quick-service restaurant’s post about a new burger on the menu.b.
A real estate agent’s post on newly-listed properties.1.
Write interesting posts to get in the News Feed.While it’s important to maintain a visually compelling Facebook Page, a large portion of brand-user interaction will actually take place in the user’s News Feed. As such, it’s as vital as ever to make sure you’re sharing fresh content and giving your followers a reason to engage with you on the social network. Post photos of your organization’s employees, share authentic stories, and keep it relevant. That’s the only way to keep the conversation going and ensure that users continue to visit your page.
2.
Don’t just sell, sell, sell: build relationships first.The fact of that matter is this: Facebook’s nearly one billion users don’t come back every day to be sold products and services. They come back because they love networking with family, friends, and, yes, brands. But you can’t just treat Facebook as a forum for pushing sales without having a conversation first. Connect with your customers and prospects, but treat them as people, not dollar signs.
3.
Humanize your brand by filling in the past.When Facebook rolled out the timeline for users last year, it released a promotional video showing a person’s life from birth to the present as visualized by timeline, with all the most important events filled in. Though your global organization or local business may not have a birthday, graduation day, honeymoon, it does have a founding date and other important milestones, like first sale and 100th customer. Use timeline to humanize your brand by showing how it has grown from just an idea years ago to a full-fledged business.
a.
Founding yearb.
First sale, hundredth sale, thousandth sale...c.
Introduction of new product or service4.
Messaging and the brand inbox.One other key feature of Facebook Pages is the ability to have private conversations with individual users. The first key thing to know about brand messaging is that users must initiate the conversation. And, secondly, brands can only send two messages to users for every one message received from the user. This is to prevent spammers from overwhelming users with sales and marketing messages. In brief, keep it classy. When a user reaches out to you, that’s an authentic, personal experience that you should treat in the same way as a face-to-face conversation.
Quick Tips:
How to Transition and
Tell Your Story
Change is hard. If you’re one of Facebook’s 845 million users, you know as well as anyone how often the social network changes its look and feel. And while the change can sometimes be jarring--as with the original rollout of News Feed way back in 2006 and timeline for users last year--these new features quickly become integral to the overall social networking experience. We expect the same to be true of the new Facebook Page Brand Timelines.
As a Facebook Preferred Developer Consultant, Hearsay Social offers Hearsay Social for Facebook Pages Brand Timeline. All Hearsay Social customers can now tell their brand story with cover photos, pinning and starring of promotional content to their timeline, and corporate/local Facebook Page campaigns, all while ensuring brand protection and regulatory compliance.
Integrated into the Hearsay Social platform, Hearsay Social Campaign & Page Management now includes Hearsay Social for Facebook Pages Brand Timeline, providing a complete solution for marketers to execute and manage social campaigns. Marketers can distribute posts, cover photos, apps, ads, and integrated campaigns to corporate pages, regional pages, and individual employee profiles and social pages. Marketers can easily manage thousands of tabs and posts per day and offer engaging content to employees, stores, or branches.
In a nutshell: social marketers at the world’s largest organizations, like Northwestern Mutual, Farmers Insurance, and 24 Hour Fitness, don’t have to worry about installing any new software to continue using Facebook efficiently for sales and marketing. And for our customers in industries regulated by FINRA, the SEC, or state insurance laws, Hearsay Social continues to provide complete compliance and complete coverage, without compliance staff having to learn any new features.
About Hearsay Social
The world’s largest companies, including Northwestern Mutual, Farmers Insurance Group, and 24 Hour Fitness, use Hearsay Social’s award-winning technology platform to achieve regulatory compliance, build stronger customer relationships, and bolster their brand across all the major social networks, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+. Hearsay Social, a SIFMA strategic partner, has raised $21M from Sequoia Capital, NEA, and top executives from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, and YouTube, and is headquartered in Silicon Valley with offices in New York and Ohio.
facebook.com/hearsaysocial @HearsaySocial
linkedin.com/company/hearsay-social blog.hearsaysocial.com
How Hearsay Social Helps
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