How Facebook Timeline measures up for brands

 interface, Internet News
Sep 182012
 

Timeline best practices

  • Design and build compelling engagement apps that speak in a meaningful way to the brand’s audience and capture the brand’s essence.
  • Don’t expect fans to “find” the apps from clicking the tiles below the cover photo. Drive traffic to that engagement app, post about it in the Timeline every day, and drive through other media.
  • Make sure apps are mobile-aware. Visit your favorite brand page on the Facebook mobile app. Find a link in the Timeline to an app. In most cases, the link doesn’t work. With extra effort, it’s possible to ensure that engagement apps run optimally on both Facebook desktop and Facebook mobile.
  • Strive to deliver fresh, engaging content every day (questions, challenges, daily prizes, sweepstakes entries, comments) to entertain fans and keep them coming back.
  • Include engaging media (photos, videos) to grab attention.
  • Incorporate user-submitted content if possible. This not only gives the fan a personal feeling of participation, but also gives the brand interesting content that can be used as the subject of future posts.
  • Look at ways gamification elements, like leaderboards, can juice engagement.

Bad Timeline habits

  • Engagement apps that pull fans away from the Facebook page and funnel them onto a website cause fans to lose the social context and limit the potential of word-of-mouth sharing on Facebook.
  • Facebook is special, yet many brands don’t offer Facebook fans something unique they can’t get anywhere else. Leverage the highest share possible — one from a valued and trusted friend — and give Facebook fans something unique.
  • Brands tend to be averse to tapping advocates to learn and connect deeply. There’s a huge amount of insight to be gained from the fans that are willing to talk about what they’ve bought or experienced.
  • Brands that don’t maximize the full potential of Facebook ad products (ads, Sponsored Stories) to drive more traffic and maximize reach miss out on engagement. Those ad products are designed to amplify good social behaviors to a wider audience and can be highly leveraged.

MORE:  How Facebook Timeline measures up for brands single page view – iMediaConnection.com.