Facebook announced a major shift in what a “Business” page will look and function like today. Here’s a short and sweet rundown on the changes and how this might impact how your business is using Facebook.
Timeline
As you can see in the graphic below, the new Pages for Facebook resembles the Timeline style used on personal profile pages. The function will be slightly different however. As an example, Apps and Custom Content will now be located below and to the right of the page’s cover photo.
Default Landing Page
Adios Amigo! A pretty big change here in that you can no longer set a default landing page for an app or custom content. Rather, your Timeline view will be your default landing page. I don’t see this as a big deal really given the fact that you can leverage the cover photo for branding. As well, apps and custom content now have much larger images that will call out for folks to visit them.
Custom Content
Custom Content and Apps will now have and expanded display area of 810px in width. As far as I know, there is no limit on height. The way I see it there are several benefits here:
- 1. A wider display area means graphics can be scaled to larger sizes and pop more.
2. Using this larger area will allow you to get more information above the fold and could possibly result in increased conversions.
3. The appearance of custom content and apps is much cleaner and has fewer distractions than the old Page style.
Additionally, apps and custom content will now be represented on the Timeline page with an image sized at 111px wide x 74px high. That’s huge compared to the old style 16x16px thumbnail. This should bring much more visibility to apps and custom content. You’ll definitely want to be strategic in using an image there that really pops and communicates well.
Pinned Posts
You can now pin a particular post to the top of your Page Timeline. The post will remain pinned for 1 week. This will be great for making sure that important information remains visible to your page visitors. A great example would be a weekly special for a restaurant or an announcement to remind people to enter a drawing or giveaway.
Messages
This feature doesn’t appear to be fully functional yet, but soon, your customers will be able to message you directly from your new Facebook Page. All the more reason to make sure you have a Social Media Customer Service Plan in place. Ultimately, what I really like about this is that customers can now communicate privately with you.
The transition from “Ads” to “Stories”
Facebook in general is moving away from using the term, “Facebook Ads”, and is trying to change the perception of advertising on Facebook in general. Ultimately, they’ll now be calling them “Stories”. If you’ve done any Facebook advertising in the past you know that they offered “Ads” and “Sponsored Stories”. It looks like everything is headed toward a sponsored story.
The positive aspect of this is that apparently, all the creation for this happens right on your Page which tells me that the process is going to be much more streamlined. As well, Facebook has really made some great progress in ensuring that your “Stories” reach far more of your fans and market than before.
Reach Generator
Facebook is rolling out a new feature called Reach Generator. In short, Reach Generator ensures that your story makes it to the Home page of your fans. Apparently a campaign that runs for one week is guaranteed to reach 50% of your fans. A one month campaign is guaranteed to reach 75% of your fans. This is a pretty big deal. Facebook has had some good algorithms for reaching target markets in the past, but reaching actual fans has always been a moving target at best.
Premium on Facebook
This will be used mostly for big brands but imagine reach 100% of your demographic on Facebook. Yes, you read that correctly. With Premium on Facebook, assuming your marketing budget is big enough, you can literally reach every single person with your demographic that is on Facebook. There are really 3 levels at which they’ll be doing this:
- 1. Right Hand Side of Home Page
2. Direct to News Feed
3. On Logout (Begins in April
This is BIG. Statistics shown during the time that Facebook has been beta testing this indicate an average of 3X ROI when using Premium on Facebook. I say not bad, $1 in get $3 out. I’m thinking I’d like to put in about $50 million myself.
So there you have it. That’s what I know at the moment. Do you have questions? Would you like to talk about how your strategy needs to change as it realtes to Facebook Marketing? If so, Contact Me and let’s talk.
