• 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.

The timelines work much like the Twitter website, providing the means for visitors to reply, retweet, follow and tweet directly, but without leaving the page.

MORE:  Twitter enables embedded timelines | News | .net magazine.

The key difference since Timeline is that now page owners have to actively promote their tab applications, whereas previously the app was the first thing new visitors saw when they came to the page. Woobox’s DeCarlo says he immediately recognized this and when Timeline launched, Woobox added a feature to give page owners a short shareable URL with a customizable image, headline and summary that would appear when the link was posted to Facebook.

Thunderpenny, another page app developer that is seeing an increase in users, has a new Tips & Tricks section that explains what page owners should do now that the default landing tab option is gone. For example, the developer recommends changing the links on a company’s website to lead to a specific tab rather than the main page. It also recommends giving the app prime placement among other tabs and using the new “pin post” option to prominently feature a status update that links to the tab.

MORE:  A few page tab apps begin to recover losses following removal of default landing tab: here’s why.

Screenshots of the new design were posted on Talking Points Memo Tuesday morning. The images (below) show a condensed version of Timeline, in which a user’s details (name, occupation, education, location) appear in reverse type on top of — rather than below — the cover photo.

The carousel of thumbnail images highlighting friends, photos, places, likes, etc. has also been compressed. Images are now replaced by thumbnails. Next to these, a new “Summary” section appears, presumably to highlight key events on a user’s Timeline.

SOURCE  Facebook Begins Testing New Timeline Design [PICS].

SOURCE: 5 blunders your brand is making on Facebook Timeline single page view – iMediaConnection.com.

More specifically, of the 4,110 respondents to the Sophos poll:

• 51.29 percent said timeline worried them;
• 32.36 percent said they didn’t know why they were still on Facebook;
• 8.39 percent guessed they’d get used to timeline; and
• 7.96 percent liked timeline.

According to  Sophos, the type of Facebook user who would respond to one of its polls is likely more security-conscious than the average user on the social network.

Still, more than 50 percent expressing concern and fewer than eight percent giving timeline the thumbs-up isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement.

SOURCE: Online Marketing Trends: Facebook Timeline Alienating 50% of its Users.

SOURCE: 5 Biggest Facebook Timeline Mistakes – Socialbakers.

Facebook’s new Timeline design gives users a large “cover photo” space at the top of the page. We think this revamp is a great opportunity to get creative with your profile presentation.

We recently asked the Mashable readership to share how they’ve played with the new design. Here are 10 examples of Facebook Timeline cover photo designs we think are particularly creative, and that offer a witty take on the new layout.

via 10 Facebook Timeline Designs That Will Blow You Away [PICS].