Whether your company’s business is in its early stages or beginning to become more established, you’ve likely dabbled in social media marketing. Most start up companies focus first on the larger social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and now Google+. It can sometimes take a while to get the hang of using social media for promotion, and things are about to get a whole lot crazier on March 30th.
March 30th of this year marks the day that Facebook will automatically switch over your business page to the new Timeline layout. This will change the overall format and navigation of your page. You will also have the ability to “pin” a specific post on the top of your Timeline so that visitors will be able to see your featured content right away.
It is important that the new layout doesn’t catch you by surprise come the end of the month. Consider some of the things you can do to prepare and make sure your Facebook remains successful:
Top 5 Ways Your Business Should Prepare for the New Timeline Layout
1. Brand Identity:
The new timeline will offer a space for a large photo right as a user clicks on your page. If you’re used to using small logo, you will likely want to come up with something more creative and less overwhelming than your logo written in huge letters. Below is an example of a company that used their large photo well:
2. Promotions:
You want users to look around your Timeline, so some companies have aligned promotions and deals with the launch of the Timeline. The new Timeline will feature milestones for your company, so you can use these milestones to create a contest for a free gift. For example, you could ask your readers, “When did our company move to a new office?” The Timeline will feature this, and this will get readers scrolling down to try and find the answer.
3. Preview:
If you ready for the new update, you can actually start trying things out early before publishing your Timeline. I highly recommend this because it will allow you to make sure everything is perfect instead of scrambling come March 30th. The new layout will allow readers to really go back into your history, so take some time to delete posts you don’t want others to see. You may also want to try several pictures before you find one that looks good in this type of format.
4. Pictures:
Not only will the Timeline highlight the big picture up top (called the cover photo), but it will highlight any and all picture you add to your Timeline. This makes adding pictures extremely important, so try and have some ready to go to help keep your users entertained and remain competitive on the network.
5. Analytics:
It is important that you consider how you are going to measure the success of your new layout. While some tactics may have been successful in the past, others will likely come to fruition with the new layout. It is important that you are ready and willing to analyze what the new layout is doing to your engagement, and then decide how you’re going to bend your strategy to accommodate.
The Timeline layout was made available to individual accounts months ago, so many of your readers will not be surprised or confused by the new layout. They will, however, be interested to see what you do with it. This layout allows for much more creativity, so it does put a bit of pressure on a company to deliver. Fortunately, you have almost an entire month to plan and prepare.
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