It has been already a half of a year since during the f8 conference (September) Facebook has announced introducing Timelines for personal profiles. Many people were wondering then if it’s going to be introduced also in case of the brand sites and fanpages. Last month it occurred that the guesses were right.
This is not about news any more, that there have been many changes introduced onto Facebook users’ private profiles last time. The most visible one is the change of site’s layout which means introducing the title Timeline. Although the topic is not on making this term more familiar, it is worth to remind the basic Timeline description (as far as not every Facebook user has decided to get the new profile yet).
As you can read on the Facebook site, the main part of pompous Facebook philosophy was the idea of telling each life story to other people.
“People use it to share everything from the small stuff, like their thoughts on an article, to the most important events of their lives, like the photos of their wedding or the birth of their child”
And even though Facebook has become one of the most important current communication channels, where people got used to share the most recent information from their lives, the creators didn’t forget about their glorious philosophy of storytelling. Due to that, smart brains decided to change profiles in a way that let you to arrange not only your current social life but also your past life, with an exhibition of all the most important events in your life.
There are of course some controversies connected to the obligatory introducing of timelines on personal profiles, but they all seem to result just from the human’s foolishness, force of habits and the general tendency to complain about everything. You can easily notice that Internet is also full of other so called Timeline Panic symptoms (e.g. the Timeline has occurred to be one of the top enemies on the Facebook Enemy Graph).
But all in all one may say there are no clear disadvantages of introducing the Timeline, even obligatory, on personal users’ profiles.
Now, coming back to the note’s caption, last month it has occurred that that (both loved and hated) Timelines has been automatically introduced also into Facebook brands’ pages. And this change is slightly different than the case of changing personal profiles. Here it is mostly about the marketing and the way of its managing. The thing is that an interesting or even just curious transformation for regular user means something completely different for the brands’ pages administrators. It means changing the Facebook page marketing strategy.
Hence that there are much more controversies connected to this recent occurrence. The arguments for this new profile look mainly stand for the things like:
- the coverphoto, that enables to show the followers the big catchy logo, or other picture promoting the brand,
- the bookmarks that have been moved to the top part of the page, what makes them supposedly more visible,
- also regular posts are supposed to be more visible, especially because of the possibility of changing their size depending on their importance,
- new layout gives also space to show off for the brands with traditions, because of the possibility of arranging and presenting their history once again, in the virtual reality,
- there is also available a new option of sending a private message to whichever brand page or fanpage, which lets to assume that the ties of each page and its followers will become stronger,
- and also other pros that recently were mentioned many times in articles and discussions on interested sites (e.g. Facebook Pages for brands are getting a Timeline-flavored).
So it seems that the new Timeline is a great gift from Facebook’s headquarters to the brands, music bands, sport teams and others who use Facebook fanpages. I guess it is indeed, to all of those who go with the flow and cath up with new media and have great social media marketing specialists, and you can already notice some effect of their adaptation to the new situation:
On the other hand, one has to be aware of the fact that many difficulties will also appear hence the Timeline introducing. It seems, quite clearly, that not every kind of public profile needs or wants the Timeline. It takes some effort and graphic designers’ work to make such a fanpage or brandpage clear, legible, catchy, aesthetic and logical (because of storytelling) at the same time. That’s why it can be said this is not only the case of getting used to the new (as with each personal profile) but there probably will be some social and simply financial costs of this transformation. Is it going to be worth its results? Worth for both business (why not to say it loud?) sides – Facebook and brands (being de facto Facebook clients)? That will occur soon.
Joanna Grabowska
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