Timeline Brings Big Changes To Brand Pages

Facebook recently unveiled big changes to brand pages with Timeline. We’re taking a look at what kind of changes they are, and what they mean for brand page owners below. First of all, is the ability to add a cover photo which can be a great way to establish branding. However, when uploading a cover photo to your brand page, Facebook states that it cannot be used for advertising and promotions. This bit is confusing, and hopefully Facebook will clarify their position on that.

Cover photos have the huge potential to create branding for brand pages, and having such restrictions on cover photos for brand pages would be a major letdown. Here’s what you would see on my brand page with Facebook’s Timeline:

Custom tabs still exist as you can see from “Portfolio,” “Services,” and “Buzz It Up.” However, they cannot be set as default tab landings, which is a drawback for page owners at the moment. Hopefully this is something that can be fixed by Facebook with enough feedback from developers and brand page owners. Originally, the tabs were “Photos,” “Likes,” “Events,” and “Map” in the place of the custom tabs, with the custom tabs ranking below.

You can “pin” the tabs you like in the order you want by clicking on the numbered icon to the right, which expands the module.

When the module is expanded, and you mouseover the tab icons and click on the little pencil icon at the top right of each icon, you’ll see that it gives you the ability to swap locations of the tabs. This is sort of a workable solution, but not a fully ideal one, for custom tabs.

You also get the ability to pin certain posts you want to the top on your Timeline, to increase visibility for fans. It allows you to highlight certain posts, promotions, and contests for fans.

You can change the dates of your wall posts. Or even hide them from the page. You still have the ability to target wall posts by location and language, much like the old Facebook brand page. What does it look like when you pin the wall post to the top? You get this little orange ribbon over the wall post module.

It’s a little odd, to be sure. The question is how this would affect the news feeds of your fans. Would they see this as a top post in their news feed when they see your fan page? Would Facebook’s EdgeRank put this down ahead of newer wall posts according to their “Time Decay” aspect? It’s not clear yet at this moment.

Now let’s take a look at another part of the new Timeline for brand pages, which is the “Message” area you see below:

It gives fans the ability to send you messages. Right now, there doesn’t seem to be a way to filter messages, otherwise you’d get a firehose of messages from fans and potential spammers if you’re a popular brand page. You can turn off that option in the admin panel in the “Manage Permissions” area where you can deselect that.

I’ve turned off the “Message” option for my brand page because it’s not clear yet how that can be feasibly managed. And going back to the admin panel, here’s what it looks like below. You can see the latest notifications, messages, Insights, and the newest “likes” you have for the page.

When you mouse over “Manage” you see “Edit Page” which takes you to your page settings such as “Your Settings,” “Manage Permissions,” “Basic Information,” “Profile Picture,” “Featured,” “Manage Admins,” “Apps,” “Mobile,” “Insights,” “Help,” and “Deals.” We’ll be going into this in much more detail in our follow up blog post to this one.

Another interesting aspect to “Build Audience” is the ability to send invitations to up to 5,000 people. You can even export people from existing mailing lists into a .csv file to invite them to your fan page. If you’ve used e-mail marketing, and used filters to separate people into social networks that they utilize, then you could possibly get more qualified fans for your fan page. This also has potential for major abuse.

While we were checking into the Admin Panel, Facebook made an interesting change to the “Help” section. As you can see above, it allows you to request a name change for the brand page. That option no longer exists as you can see now:

Huh. Very interesting. Facebook apparently decided that wasn’t a feasible option for page owners at this moment. They might’ve gotten too many requests for name changes. That would have been potentially problematic with page owners requesting new names that are possibly duplicative of other brand pages’ names.

So far, it’s looking great for brand pages. There are some minor drawbacks and major improvements to be sure. We’ll continue blogging about this today at Buzzworthy Social Media with more posts to come. Got questions for us? Feel free to ask away on our fan page right here, or send us a tweet on Twitter.