Over the weekend, brands and businesses on Facebook transited over to the new Facebook Timeline. If you’re a small business owner and have a Facebook Page for it and haven’t noticed – shame on you.
You’d have noticed that the layout of your Page has changed significantly. The question for small business owners is – how do we leverage the new Timeline and maximize the use of the new features such as Cover Photo and Pinned Posts?
We ask the Facebook team for some tips, and this is what we got:
1. Upload an Eye-Catching Cover Photo.
The new Cover Photo captures the culture and essence of a brand and can showcase their products – it’s the first thing people will see when they visit a brand’s page. Lexus’ cover photo, which features their new futuristic 2+2 coupe LF-LC concept vehicle, has generated a ton of buzz and helped lead to a 200% increase in unique page views on launch day. Brands can change it as often as they like and use it to engage fans through creative, stimulating images their audience will respond to.
2. Use a Clearly Branded Profile Picture.
This is the best spot to use a picture that visibly identifies their business. Since the profile picture represents a brand’s Page on other parts of Facebook as a thumbnail (such as in ads or news feed), a high quality image (such as a logo) that people associate with their brand should be used.
3. Add Milestones to the Page Timeline.
Businesses can now take advantage of larger photo, video and link stories to visually engage fans. To ensure fans see the best posts, posts can be featured on their timeline so fans can engage with a post past the time it’s in the news feed. Milestones can also be used to define key moments in their company’s history, allowing fans to interact with a business beyond the present. Red Bull created “Timeline Timewarp,” a scavenger hunt contest that led fans through their brand history, resulting in increased interaction with the new milestones they’d included in their timeline.
4. Pin a Post a Week.
Businesses can anchor the most important story to the top of their page for up to seven days so that fans don’t miss the best content. TurboTax – in the middle of their craziest month – is using pinned posts to make sure their fans see their updated FAQs and as a result saw Likes for the post were 257% higher than average and comments on the post were 100% higher than average.
5. Arrange Views and Apps.
A brand’s photos and custom apps will appear at the top of their Page and can be reordered at any time. Brands can also create custom thumbnails to highlight what matters most to them – whether it’s events or custom-built apps for specific products or promotions. Sprinkles Cupcakes is a great example of a business who displays their custom photos and apps at the top of their Page.
6. Manage Your Page.
Administrators can now easily manage their Page through the Admin Panel, which gives them a high-level dashboard where they can edit content, track new activity and respond, and view Page Insights.
So get cracking, and see if making these tweaks will help you garner more engagement, and hence, customers.
