On 2/29/2012, Facebook held their first marketing conference in New York City. With that came news about how business pages would be changing, the introduction of new admin and marketing features and tips on how business owners can leverage the new page layout and marketing tools.
There are mixed feelings about the changes throughout the marketing community and of course, an abundance of information and coverage. Whether or not you have been following any of this coverage, I would like to share some information I have come across over the last couple of days.
5 of my must read blog posts covering Facebook’s changes:
1.) The Complete Guide to Setting Up the New Facebook Page Design
– this blog post by Pamela Vaughan on the HubSpot Blog gives you a step by step on how to setup your new page, talks about additional features available to page admins and goes over best practices for marketers to follow to get the most out of the new page designs.
2.) 7 Big Features of Facebook Timeline for Brands
– this is a post by Gary Nix on The Blue Fountain Media blog and provides awesome numbered visuals that are perfect for familiarizing yourself with some of the changes Facebook is making to brand pages.
3.) Facebook Unveils New Marketing Tactics For Brands
– this is a post by Howard Greenstein on Inc. This is a great post that summarizes the conference and some of the new features.
4.) Tips to Drive More Traffic to your Custom Tabs from Timeline
– this post is featured on the Pagemodo blog and provides tips on how to drive traffic to your custom tabs from timeline. This post also provides awesome visuals and step by steps to follow. If you aren’t familiar with Pagemodo, they provide free DIY landing pages. With Facebook’s announcement that business pages can no longer default to a custom app (landing page), it will be interesting to see how Pagemodo adapts to these changes. I reached out to Pagemodo via Twitter and they responded with the following:
@ckilgs Over the next several days, we will be making additional changes to Pagemodo to ensure an optimal experience w/ the new Timeline.
— Pagemodo (@Pagemodo) March 1, 2012
5.) Facebook Timeline For Pages Kills Marketing Feature: Default Landing Tabs
– last but certainly not least is Josh Constine’s post on Tech Crunch. I like this post because it is one of the few that I came across that is more opinion based with some awesome information and statistics.
[Update] Here’s a bonus 6th post worth checking out
6.) The Story of a Lifetime: Getting Your Facebook Page “Timeline Ready”
– Shannon Gallagher of rtraction reached out to me on Twitter with this incredibly unique post that was awesome enough to update this post with. Shannon does an incredible job of summarizing Facebook’s recent changes with tips for page admins and marketers. Not only does she break down the changes in an easy to follow way, she does so in an actual timeline format. This is a perfect example of the creative content marketers will have to embrace to get the most out of Facebook’s timeline for brands.
What do you think of the changes?
If you’ve had a chance to play around with the new layout and features, share your thoughts in the comment section below or reach out to me via Twitter or Google+ with your likes/dislikes and features you would like to see made available to business page administrators.
Expect plenty of more coverage to come in the weeks leading up to March, 30th which is the date Facebook will automatically convert all business pages to the new timeline format (if they have not already done so).
Post by Craig Kilgore - SEO @mainstreethost
Twitter: @ckilgs
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