Posts Tagged ‘Timeline’

Time to get in the line

Friday, March 9th, 2012

TimelineSo the timeline for brands is finally here. After months of speculation about what all will it bring with it, we now know that the platform is all set to undergo another major shift in communication pattern. Emphasis will now be on visual creative and storytelling. We analyze the changes that the platform will see in this article.

Getting Covered

The most noticeable change that anyone would see is the huge space that is going to be available right on top of the page to put up a cover photo. The size of the cover photo is 810×350 pixels. In a way, this is the largest available space that Facebook has ever given a brand to reach out to their audience.

Cover
Cover Photo (click on the image to enlarge it)

While this is a big real estate for advertising, Facebook has not allowed brands to have any calls to action in your cover photo. You can’t tell people to like or share your page or have any contact information at all, including your web address, phone number or mailing address.

The highlight of the change

The timeline has also brought about a major alteration in content distribution. The content is now spread in to two columns rather than one single stack up. This means a side by side post will let you prolong your post life a little bit longer than before. Also, all post by people on the page gets segregated into one block which comes on the top most part of the right column.

Highlight
Highlighted Post (click on the image to enlarge it)

Not only that, like with cover photos, Facebook has now given you the ability to emphasize your story telling with bigger picture. So now, if you want a particular post to garner more views and appear more striking on the page, simply highlight it and the image and the post will spread across the two columns of the page, giving you one big eye catching post.

On pins and needles without landing tab

Yes. You read that right. The landing tab has been eliminated from the new design. The face of the campaign pages, the launch page for competitions and application does not get a look in the new design. What you do get instead is a pinned post.

Pinned post is nothing but a normal post, ideally with a campaign launch creative, which can be pinned to the top of the page. Through this option, this creative will get the top post slot for a period of seven days. The idea is that while you may not be able to get people to land on a particular tab, you can make them notice the main campaign first up. The pinned post comes with a small orange tag on the right top corner.

 pinnedPinned Post

This could have been put up on the cover page but then with cover page restriction of no call to action and no communication, that idea gets tossed out. Thus, this makes the pinned post the only alternative for a landing tab.

Every milestone counts

Facebook has always wanted people to document their life by sharing posts, videos and photos. Even relationships and friendships are highlighted in the personal profile. That is what Facebook has brought to the brand timeline.

Documenting the progress of the brand through milestones. The day the brand came in to existence, that new office, the 100th employee or the letter of appreciation from a famous customer. Facebook wants the brands to narrate those things to its audience. Make it more human than ever before. Audience of the page can directly navigate to a particular year via the timeline.

milestoneThis is quite literally, Facebook’s way of telling the brand managers to stop worrying about the numbers on the page but building a strong brand. Bring out the history and the emotions associated with the brand before you go looking for the ROI.


Tab dancing

With the new two column layout, the new tab has lost out majorly. The list of tabs and application that was there below the profile picture now gets lost. And almost become invisible. Though they have been moved right under the cover photo, there is a restriction of only 4 tabs to be visible while the rest get demoted into a drop down.

Tabs
Tabs

Amongst those 4 visible ones, the first one is always going to be that for photos. That leaves only 3 visible tabs for your competitions, applications, likes, notes and all that you want to do. So what will be needed is a more planned approach to launch of applications and campaigns. Making sure that there is no overlap so that each campaign can get a proper display in the tabs.

Tab Size
New Tab Size (click on the image to enlarge it)

Once on the tab, the creative space that the tab gets is now 810 pixels as compare to 510 before. This means there is a lot more space for you to put images and copy. A good brand would use this intelligently.

The Backend

Another change with the Timeline is the location of the Insights. You can now access them by clicking on the Admin Panel in the upper right corner. The Admin Panel has much different navigation than before, but everything appears to be there. From the Admin Page, you can also invite your email contacts, invite friends, share your page and create an ad from the Build Audience drop-down menu.

Insight
Insight (click on the image to enlarge it)

One of the capabilities will be to easily request a name change for your page. This name change is the title of your page, not the custom URL you may have set for your page. Great news for people who have changed their company branding, have had a misspelling in the name or have other tweaks they have wanted to make.

Messages                            Messages

Pages will also have the ability to receive messages from fans. The Message feature can be turned on or off from the Manage Permissions area of the Admin Dashboard. Messages can only be initiated by a fan—they cannot be initiated by the page to a fan. The page can reply to the message sent.

Reaching Out

The ads have got a makeover. They will be larger and come in form of Reach Generator and Premium on Facebook. The Reach Generator is designed to reach more of your existing fans than you currently are reaching through the news feed. Premium on Facebook is designed to distribute your stories to new connections and will be shown on the right side of the home page, in the news feed, in mobile streams and when someone logs out of Facebook. Beta testing has shown that the reach for these products through in line feed push can go up to as high as 80 to 90% of total estimated reach.

With Reach generator, the posts on the wall will be used to reach the audience. That means a higher engagement can be expected through this paid mechanism. This makes the job of page admin that much more important as s/he would need to decide which post should be best used for such a campaign.

In the pipeline

While these are the major changes that have happened as of now, few more features would surely be added in the new system soon. This includes Facebook offers. Facebook Offers are like Facebook Deals on steroids. The post is sent through the news feeds of your fans, which is much more visible. There are easy ways to share the Offer, both through the post itself and then when the Offer is claimed. Fans get the Offer by clicking the Get Offer link

Fan Gating, another standard feature in pre timeline era used to get people to like the page, is currently missing. This is something most experts believe will soon be brought back since it forms a part of loyalty program.

Changes to Facebook have always made brands nervous along with their agencies. But this time around, the nervousness is more about the things that have been dropped out rather than the ones that have been added. But it is clear from all these changes that Facebook wants the brands to build brands on its real estate rather than sell.

Facebook becomes a year book

Monday, October 3rd, 2011

Facebook has made a radical change to its user interface- the first since the launch of Google +. While it would take some time for the entire gamut of changes to make a marked difference to our experience, let us peep under the hood, at how the Facebook is set to change.

Timing the changes

The most striking feature is the new Timeline, a chronological layout of the profile/page which shows everything that the user/page has done since getting on to Facebook. It is a more simple and efficient way of checking out a profile or a page. The interface itself is far neater and clears a lot of clutter. One interesting feature is that now a lot of options have been put in a drop down rather than a separate button.

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Each friend is important

Facebook has also introduced new friend lists, which is an optional feature, and is essentially a redesign of a feature it’s had for years—Lists. The original Lists were difficult to navigate and tedious to update, which was the reason for the revamp. If you choose to activate the lists, Facebook will generate four separate lists for you: work, school, family and city. Facebook puts people into these lists based on information they have in their profile. For example, if you list Harvard University as your alma mater, and so do 25 of your Facebook friends, they will be grouped under "school." In addition to this you also get two lists that you curate on your own to distinguish close friends from people you don’t know well.

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The news maker

Before these changes, when you logged into Facebook you could toggle between two views of your News Feed: Top News and Most Recent. Now, Facebook combined these two in a single News Feed. Now, what you see when you first log in depends on how frequently you log in. If you don’t visit Facebook regularly, the next time you do you’ll see top photos and status updates that were posted since the last time you visited the site. These are marked with a blue corner. If you log into Facebook frequently, such as several times a day, you’ll likely see the most recent stories first.

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1: Top Stories 2: Side Panel 3: Recent Stories

News keeps trickling

Another addition to the system is the Ticker. This is a smart move as all the updates which are not direct interaction with an individual will show up here. Thus, clearing the wall for more direct status updates and relegating your friends Farmville exploits to the ticker. Furthermore, note the updated photos. New Facebook interface is now enlarging its size so it looks more clear and comfortable to view while users navigate and have fun.

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Know more than just friends

Subscriptions, another key feature launched recently, lets you see people’s public posts in your News Feed, without having to friend them. And while Facebook Subscriptions is an interesting way to broaden your network and connect with people you otherwise wouldn’t have contact with, it also gives people who had a page and a profile to merge it.

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The Verdict

The changes are intended to help you keep up with people that matter to you, regardless of how often you visit the site. The new Timeline interface is beautiful and a major time sink. Overall, Facebook has made profiles more personal. Users are going to be spending hours in their friends’ Timelines. The addition of the Cover Photo makes the Facebook interface more beautiful, and the timeline is easy on the eyes. While it will take some time to get used to the two-column layout, it actually is easier to navigate than the old Facebook. Facebook thought hard about the design of this change.

As a business entity, this means more display space for the brands. The cover photo can actually be used as banner ad space for which they won’t have to spend anything. Also, with expected time spent on Facebook going up, it can only be good news for the brands. What is most interesting though is the fact that Facebook seems to be quite sure of the changes and that could be a worry for Google.