On Wednesday, February 29, 2011, Facebook rolled out the new Timeline feature for companies with brand pages on the social network.
Like individual users, marketers on Facebook will now be able to use the visually oriented format to highlight their entire history, as well as show more current updates. The new brand pages are launching with a small group of partners, including Walmart, Dove, Tiffany and Harley-Davidson.
Manchester United Timeline Brand Page (Click Image To Enlarge)
Coldplay Timeline Brand Page (Click Image To Enlarge)
Facebook announced it would extend Timeline to brands when it first unveiled the feature for personal profiles in September. It has launched a help page explaining how Timeline works for businesses in advance of its fMC event in New York today, where it’s expected to formally debut the brand page upgrade.
New features include the ability to pin important posts to the top of the Timeline for a week and exchange private messages with users. Previously, companies were not allowed to contact fans directly.
Ben & Jerry"s Timeline Brand Page (Click Image To Enlarge)
Starbuck's Timeline Brand Page (Click Image To Enlarge)
Companies, like people, can also choose a large cover image for their pages. But the photo can’t include price, purchase information or calls to action -- so users don’t confuse them with actual ads.
All brand pages can upgrade to Timeline starting Wednesday, February 29, 2012. They also have an optional period to curate material before the changeover becomes mandatory on March 30.
Timeline for brands offers the potential for marketers to better showcase products and services and connect with fans, especially for classic brands like Coca-Cola or Harley-Davidson.
Beth McCabe, vice president/director, social marketing and technology, at Digitas said.
“It’s going to be a very interesting proposition for brands with a storied past that can really explore their history, as well as what’s happening more recently.”
She and other agency executives suggested the overhaul could also have pitfalls for some businesses. Consider companies whose histories include controversies or PR debacles they would rather bury, such as BP. Like individual users, companies will be able to hide posts they don’t want to be surfaced.
But trying to whitewash difficult periods in a company’s past could also be problematic. Robin Grant, managing director of social marketing agency We Are Social noted.
“This new format is pretty unforgiving to those who would rather keep their history well and truly behind them.”
The page update could also encourage more brands to create their own custom apps with the Open Graph platform around verbs such as “listening” or “cooking.” In January, Facebook released more than 60 new apps for Timeline, including ones for reviewing movies (RottenTomatoes), traveling (TripAdvisor) and Pinterest (“pinning” items).
The idea is that the new offerings will inspire users to visit company pages and interact with and share their content even more. Grant said.
“Overall, this is a positive move by Facebook, and a good opportunity for brands to show off their roots -- something that might actually be of interest to fans.”
Facebook hosts some 4 million brand pages in total.
COMMENTARY: If you ask me, the new Facebook brand timeline pages are much-ado-about nothing, because downloading of timeline data will blogdown the entire user experience whenever you click on the year for the timeline data you wish to view. You are talking about a lot of data, including wall posts, fan comments, likes, content like pictures and videos. For some brand this may not be an issue, but if you have a huge fan following and lots of activity, this could become an issue downloading all that data.
On the plus side, a brand time line page could be useful if you are doing research on a particular brand or searching for UGC about what fans said about or LIKED about a brand or its product. The big negative is revealing negative data, which reopens old wounds, like the British Petroleum oil platform fire and oil leak into the Gulf of Mexico.
Twitter is providing brand pages finally, and has promised to provide them with old tweets of their followers so that they can do research. Now that could be useful. Will Facebook provide brands tools to sort through their timeline data?
Facebook is not making any money off the new brand timeline pages, so this freemium service is spoiling brands even more. Although they cannot directly advertise, many brands prefer to use Facebook for fan engagement. Advertising is a non-issue since they are not buying much advertising on Facebook. Most brands use Facebook for brand awareness, fan engagement, and research.
Courtesy of an article dated February 29, 2012 appearing in MediaPost Publications Online Media Daily
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