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On February 29, Facebook announced their changes to Facebook Pages and Ads. All Facebook Brand Pages will be automatically updated to the new Timeline format on March 30, 2012. What does this mean for your brand?

Facebook’s new Timeline for Brand Pages places more emphasis on quality engagement to gain fans. Before the switch, it is important to understand the role of the new features and how to incorporate them into your social media marketing strategy.

Tell a Compelling Brand Story

Facebook’s new About Section, Timeline and Cover Photos provides additional opportunities to deliver a more robust brand story and brand identity.

About Section

• The section that used to be buried in the “Info” tab on your company page is now is more prominent, running on the top of your page.
• Consider rewriting it to show off your brand’s best aspects. Keep it short and to the point. Only about the first 150 characters of the content will show on your Timeline.

Your Timeline:

• Using the new milestones feature, you can now publish pertinent events in your brand’s history and build your  brand identity.  Post sponsorship events, charity activations, the invention of your product and more to let consumers know what your brand is all about.
• Every milestone must have a title, year and photo. The earliest milestone you can record is 1800.

Cover Photos

• Use the cover photo to capture your audience’s interest and feature your product or services in a creative way.
• According to Facebook Guidelines, brands cannot use their cover photo to reference or point to the Like button, special offers or any other Calls to Actions (which is disappointing, we know.)
• Want some more creative tips on what to use for your Cover Photo? Sign up for the Moose Blog RSS feed to receive next week’s post, when we review some creative tips for the new Facebook updates.

Profile Picture

• Use this space to feature the brand logo. Consider working the logo into your cover photo for an interesting layout. For instance, Eristoff uses the logo that seems to be taken right off of the bottle: https://www.facebook.com/EristoffVodka

App/Content Call Outs

• The photo album will always live as the first featured app under the cover photo; however, brands can switch the order of their featured apps and tabs.
• Consider using strong Call to Actions in the featured app/custom tab thumbnails.
• Brands can still use Fan Gates on their custom apps or tabs, but brands can no longer make that Fan Gate the default landing page for their Facebook Profile. We still recommend using a fan gate because brands can increase their Likes for access to custom content in their apps or tabs. Facebook ads can also still be targeted to a Fan Gate directly.

Highlight Specific Posts

Facebook’s new posting features provide opportunities for optimizing posts based on consumer engagement and to feature specific Calls to Action on your Brand Page.

Starred Posts

• Brands can star a post to make it span the full width of the page.
• What type of content received the most engagement from your community (Likes and comments)? Use this information to guide what posts receive a star.
• Another consideration is the visual aspect of your page, aim to star posts with pictures and/or videos to draw a users eye into the engaging content.

Pinned Posts
Brands can pin posts to automatically stay at the top of their Facebook Page for up to a seven day time period.

• Place an emphasis on posts that are conversion-focused. What are you trying to achieve through your social initiatives?  This varies amongst brands, but some of the typical ones include: a sweepstakes Call to Action, an offer, a piece of exclusive content, a newsletter sign up, or posts related to an app on your page.

With these new additions and changes, brands have more opportunities to engage their community with quality content via their Facebook Brand Page. Since brands can no longer use a Fan Gate as their default landing page tab, it is even more important that their Timeline is optimized with quality content to attract more Likes for the brand.

For a step-by-step walkthrough video of the new Page changes from Facebook, visit: http://www.learnfacebookpages.com/

Coming Soon: We’ll discuss what the new Facebook Brand Pages means from a design perspective.

Do you like the new changes from Facebook? Let us know in the comments.