The other day I came upon a remark about Timeline. It said that there would probably be a Timeline layout coming along affecting Fan Page marketing, but no one at Facebook said anything definitive yet.
Well, Beth McCabe, vice president and Director of social marketing and technology at Digitas, made a few definite remarks in All Facebook, the Unofficial Facebook Resource (12.20.11), in an article called "How Timeline Changes Marketing On Facebook"(12.20.11).
Brave Beth said that since Timeline was so new and people needed to learn to use it, it is “a good thing that brand pages haven’t migrated to this new layout yet.” Please note the word “yet”. Beth goes on to state that she knows that Facebook is working to upgrade brand pages even though they haven’t given a start-up date and no one knows what the changes are going to be. Beth thinks that how people deal with Timeline will have something to do with whether the social network will go to fan pages.
That doesn’t sound very definite to me. Maybe I missed an announcement?
Beth goes on to explain that timeline profiles are going to “have other implications for brands on Facebook”. She proceeds to talk about “Likes”, “Sponsored Stories”, and “Graph Rank”.
What about Likes?
Since Timeline is a shift from the chronological method of posting activities to aggregated content displayed by relevance on Graph Rank, stories that are posted when a user likes your brand’s page may not show up as the stop story on their profile page for very long.
Beth said that “brand likes will be collected together and displayed as a group within the time period the actions were taken.” Since the measure is time, these likes will go down the page and become older content. This will make it easier to check out a user’s Timeline history, discovering older likes in a way that couldn’t be done before.
Basically you will be able to tell that a friend of yours liked Starbucks years ago before it was as hot an item as today, but you might miss the fact that he liked the new My Little Ponies’ movie. Maybe this is not so bad a thing.
Sponsored Stories-What’s up or down?
The number and format of sponsored stories may not have changed, but the number of these kinds of promos that will appear on the page’s news feed and ticker has dropped down to either two or three. Beth considers this a “paradox because of the amount of time people may spend perusing timeline pages might increase compared to the old profiles.” She thinks the promotions on the new profile pages should become worth more.
What is Graph Rank and where has Edge Rank gone?
Edge Rank has been the algorithm that Facebook has used to determine if something is relevant and has been the filter for content that shows up on user’s news feeds.
Graph Rank adds an open graph to the equations, with factors like how often do you and your friends interact with the content posted by an app. If the app gets lots of use, it can go to the top of the feed and become highlighted.
“’How often will this app be used?’” Beth said was a question that users should consider as they design apps for clients who only publish stories once. This will be considered of less value to the brand because it is less likely to earn high Graph Rank and will slip southward to the bottom. This is very disheartening when I consider that the web crawlers discourage over saturating a site with the same story.
Of course there are probably some major changes that well take place within Timeline and Graph Rank since they are so new. Beth said, “We can only hope that Facebook publishes guidelines for bands on how to take advantage of timeline.”
Have you started having experiences with Timeline yet? How do you feel about it?
Jaco Grobbelaar, owner of BroadVision Marketing, helps business owners and business professionals put marketing strategies in place that consistently secure new clients. He can be reached at jaco@broadvisionmarketing.com or 707.799.1238. You can “Like” him at www.facebook.com/broadvisionmarketing or connect with him on www.linkedin.com/in/JacoGrobbelaar.
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