Posts tagged Timeline
Facebook Timeline Changed the Way We See Brand Pages
May 11th
It's easy to see that fans focused heavily on the Cover Photo in the Timeline layout.
When Facebook launched Timeline for brands last month, it wasn’t just marketers’ social media strategies that got turned upside down.
The new format also changed the way consumers experience brands on Facebook.
In a webcam eye-tracking study for Mashable by EyeTrackShop, participants spent less time looking at Wall posts and ads and more time looking at the cover photo on brands’ timelines than they did on their old Facebook Walls.
“The new Facebook Timeline limits the effective branding space, and the top portion of the page must be effectively utilized,” suggest the study’s authors.
EyeTrackShop recorded eye movements of 30 participants as they were shown brand profiles — before and after being converted to timeline — from the Dallas Cowboys, Good Morning America, “The Muppets” and Pepsi in 10-second intervals. What participants looked at on each webpage, for how long and in what order is recorded in the images below.
Results suggests a few ways our perception of Brands on Facebook has changed:
- Ads on Facebook Timeline are less visible than ads on Facebook Brand Pages. While 30%-40% of study participants looked at ads on brand Timeline pages, 80% looked at them on Brand Pages. In both cases, ads placed higher up on the page fared better than those below them.
- Cover photos are the new Facebook Wall (at least as far as attention goes). On brand pages, Wall posts were the star attraction. Viewers on average looked at them first and for the longest amount of time.On the brand Timelines, however, viewers always looked at the cover photo first. In all but one case, they spent a longer time looking at it than at Timeline content.
- Everyone will notice your cover photo. It’s larger than anything else and at the top of the page for a reason, and 100% of viewers looked at it. On average, they saw it in 0.5 seconds or less. Meanwhile, only 65% to 92% of viewers noticed profile photos on Brand Pages.
- Viewers see Timeline content last. In every case, viewers looked at either the left or right column of Timeline content last — after ads, navigation buttons and brand logos.
- Information that was invisible is now a focal point.Facebook moved the number of Likes, events and apps to prime top-and-center territory. It now gets more attention than when it was listed on the right-hand side of the page.In the case of Good Morning America, for instance, the show’s 585,000 Likes went from being completely ignored on its Brand Page to being the biggest attention-getter on its Timeline.
- Cover photos with faces attract the most attention. Good Morning America and “The Muppets” have cover photos with faces, whereas the Dallas Cowboys and Pepsi do not. The cover photos with faces attracted more attention.
Still don’t have a cover photo? That’s okay, we have options for you! Take a look at the 16 Cover Photos we created just for college stores and choose your favorite. Even if you decide to design your own, just make sure you have something in place for Fans to focus on at the top of your page – it’s the best way to make a good first impression!
Facebook Timeline Coming to Brand Pages This Month
Feb 23rd
Facebook will bring its Timeline profile pages to brands this month in the U.S., according to executives briefed on the company’s plans.
At its F8 conference in September, Facebook introduced a dramatic transformation of profile pages for its more than 800 million users with the Timeline format, which generates picture-heavy, scrapbook-like collages spanning users’ entire history on the social network. It has been rolled out slowly, and users still have the choice to opt in.
At the time of the announcement, the company said it would wait to roll out the new feature for brands. Facebook VP-Marketing and Business Partnerships David Fischer said Timeline for brands would be “consistent” with the Timeline look-and-feel, but not a carbon copy.
The new pages for brands will start in beta with a handful of partners and then be released to more marketers in stages, according to the sources. Facebook declined to comment on the product or the timing.
So what will Timeline for brands look like? For one, the tabs or apps marketers currently host on their Facebook pages to sell products or take polls may turn into boxes on the brand’s Timeline, much like how apps for Spotify or Washington Post Social Reader live on users’ Timelines.
The format change could put the onus on brands to develop their own apps using custom verbs other than “like,” in the same vein as Pinterest, which has a Facebook app that tracks when its users have “pinned” something. Promoting the use and development of “Open Graph” apps, which can have their data tapped for ad targeting, is an area of increased focus for Facebook.
Timeline has significant implications for Facebook fan-page management. One top consideration is that a brand’s Facebook presence no longer must date to when it joined the site but can be represented with content populating its Timeline from throughout its history. (Coca-Cola, for example, could hypothetically add an event for 1892, the year it was founded.)
Facebook is expected to go into detail about the new pages at its first-ever fMC event, a day-long conference in New York on Feb. 29 specifically for marketers.
Are you excited for Timeline on your store’s page or would you rather stick with the format you have now? Share your opinion by commenting below!
Social Media Series: Facebook Timeline’s Benefit for Brands
Oct 6th
Facebook is making major changes to its platform and your store needs to stay in the loop! Check out the following article Why Facebook Timeline Will Be Huge for Brands, written by Zeny Huang, Emerging Media Strategist at JWT New York, and published on Mashable.
Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, introduced the new Timeline feature at the company's f8 Developer Conference.
When Facebook unveiled Timeline last week, many users were struck by the idea of humanizing your profile by summarizing your life and connections.
But what if you’re not a human at all?
Timeline may have a similar effect on brands as well. In fact, the brand benefits of Timeline could be huge, and will let companies tell a more engaging and authentic story. This is one reason (beyond the 800 million active users) that brands should be celebrating the new changes to Facebook even if the network hasn’t yet confirmed that brand pages will employ Timeline. Here are a few more reasons we hope they do.
According to Dr. John Medina’s book Brain Rules, vision is our most powerful sense, and “we learn and remember best through pictures, not through written or spoken words.” This helps explain the popularity of infographics, photo apps like Instagram and visual blog platforms like Tumblr. We increasingly consume information through photos, from browsing friends’ Facebook albums to mobile Twitpics. Accordingly, Facebook has made photos a main focus of the new Timeline profile.
Compared to the current Facebook brand page (which only allows the profile picture and five thumbnails to be customized, hiding photo albums and tagged photos beneath the Wall), Timeline unlocks new possibilities for branding, raising awareness and creativity. The “Cover,” an 849 by 312 pixel image spanning the top of your profile, can be changed at any time and is major real estate for a brand — perfect for a product shot or promotion push. In addition, brands could call out important photos on the Timeline by clicking a star on the post that expands the photo to widescreen.
Brands can be more interesting
Currently, the hidden “Info” tab on the Facebook brand page serves as a dumping ground for every bit of information about a brand in a boring text format. When deciding whether to drive paid media to Facebook or a brand site, brands face the challenge of choosing between growing their Facebook community or providing a more informative and better user experience elsewhere. Now, the decision tips a bit more in Facebook’s favor as Timeline makes it easier for people to find information by pushing the Info section, photos, apps and map to the top of the page in a clear navigation bar.
While conversations on Facebook still matter, information and content have become more prominent in the Timeline design. The infinite scroll prolongs the lifespan of brand content, giving people more to engage and consume, which will lead to more chatter, and focuses more on quality of posts over quantity, since posts don’t disappear “below the fold” of the Facebook wall.
With the focus shifting from building conversation to sharing content, the purpose of a Facebook brand page will be less about selling and more about telling an authentic story. Brands can express what makes them unique and build an emotional connection with fans through behind-the-scenes photos, blooper videos, real-time mobile pictures, sound clips and exclusive news. In addition to expressing the brand in the present, a brand can utilize the Timeline to speak to its past to reignite nostalgia and sentiment that may be associated with it.
It simplifies what it means to be on Facebook
The focus on telling a brand story lowers the barriers to entry for brands on Facebook, especially small businesses like a car repair shop, florist or restaurant that don’t have the budget or content to sustain a community. Prior to Timeline, brands often felt confused as to how Facebook fit into their brand strategy and felt the need to have a gimmicky app or sampling incentive for people to “Like” or engage with their page. According to ExactTarget, of the people who “Like” Facebook brand pages, 40% are doing that to receive discounts and promotions. Now with the larger post size and photos, Timeline can easily serve as a brand blog, providing fans with frequent and engaging updates in a neatly packaged profile.
The same challenges of building a brand hub and bringing the brand to life on Facebook still exist, but the design of Timeline will make content creation easier by providing a skeleton for brands to fill in.
What do you think of Facebook’s new features? Share your input on our page!
