What Facebook Timeline means for Marketers

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IT’S TIME!

 

 

 

With Facebook Timeline officially rolled out for personal profiles, the focus is now on how marketers will embrace the opportunities and navigate the challenges Facebook’s latest – and greatest? – presents for business and brand pages.
Timeline has the potential to be a game changer for businesses. More significantly, though, it highlights the importance of understanding the constantly evolving communication tools marketers work with.

 

 

Personal Timelines

Before we move into speculation on how the business version of Timeline will work, it’s important to take a moment (hell, take a few moments) to really interact with your own Timeline and start finding out how personal changes affect our marketing goals. For example, ‘liking’ a page now holds far less importance on a Timeline profile. While it will still show up on the page, the activity will stay visible for far less time, and the design of the template is such that unless the activity is very recent indeed, it won’t stay up for very long at all.
Conversely, however, the increasingly visual nature of Facebook means that image and video content is more important than ever. The relatively new ‘share’ function is looking to be the modern equivalent of the ‘like’ and allows a visible record of how, where and why the photo has been shared, not to mention maintaining a level of ownership for the person/business who originally posted the content.

 

 

A word on social apps

Social apps, which were unveiled at the same time as Timeline but implemented much sooner, will likely form the basis of many future business offerings. More and more external content-providing sites are creating social apps to be used within Facebook, which means that all activity on those sites can go on without the user having to leave Facebook.

As we know, Facebook has been logging our activities on other sites for years now, and the new social apps seem to be the culmination of what the social giant has discovered in that time.

 

 

When businesses get a timeline of their own…

While Facebook hasn’t come straight out and promised that businesses will be getting timelines all their own, it has banged on about consistency of form across the board and wanting ‘to make Pages more consistent with the new Timeline in the future’.

Our guess is that Facebook will take its time to analyse the more successful elements of the Timeline design before rolling them out into something that works for a business page as well. In fact, this is the perfect opportunity for marketers to do the same. We should be playing around with our personal timelines, figuring out what we like about other people’s and framing it in the context of how we’ll set up our business page when ol’ Zucky finally gives us the green light to do so.

 

A Tick Yes digital and social media blog