On March 30, Facebook released the timeline update for all brand pages. This update has some great new features that should help businesses organize their image and help engage their audience. Here are the new features briefly explained.
The first feature, the Star and Pin features, are for timeline posts. These features allow a company to tell its story and highlight milestones or special events that the company is proud of. The Star feature allows you to enlarge a post/image/video to fill the width of the screen on the timeline, making it more noticeable. The Pin feature allows you to pin a post/image/video to the top of your timeline for exactly 7 days.
The next feature is an effort to help organize the many apps and games that can be used on Facebook. There is a section just below the cover photo where a list of Facebook apps used by the brand will be displayed. These apps can be placed in a specific order based on what is important to the brand. The screenshot shows that chatmeter uses the photos, likes, and blog apps.
Fans/users can now send business messages directly to their Facebook Brand Pages and the business can reply to that message directly. This is a great feature for businesses to get feedback from their customers. This could be good news for people who monitor company reviews and social media. If customers start messaging businesses directly about product complaints, those complaints won’t be posted in a public space. This feature could be very powerful for businesses that manage their online reputation by responding to guest posts. On the other hand, if a business doesn’t respond to messages, it could damage their online reputation.
The best feature from a social media monitoring perspective is the new admin panel. This allows you to track and view all activity on a page, from new likes, messages, posts, to who is replying to posts. This provides a snapshot of recent page activity and allows the user to respond and update content from this panel.
The latest feature of Facebook is the cover photo feature, when the timeline went live for personal accounts, they implemented this feature. Now the cover photo option is available for brand pages. With this additional release came some Facebook rules that apply to businesses using this feature.
you cannot have:
Price or purchase information, such as “40% off” or “Download it on our website”
Contact information, such as web address, email, postal address, or other information intended for the About section of your page
References to user interface elements, such as Likes or Shares, or any other features of the Facebook site
Calls to action, such as “Get it now” or “Tell your friends”
These rules are in place to keep brand pages “human.” This should give a sense of connection between the companies and their current and potential followers.
Facebook will continue to change and innovate its user interface to keep it fresh and dynamic and keep consumers coming back to the platform. These new features allow companies to communicate what is new and important in a bolder and more effective way with their audience. Also, as email use continues to decline, the new messaging feature allows Facebook fans to communicate with the company without sharing their message on the web. Businesses need to embrace these new features and integrate them into their online strategy for effective customer communications.