(eM+C)—Facebook recently announced the launch of Facebook Timeline for Brands, or new profile pages for brands on the social networking site. New features of brand pages include the following:
• Pages are much more visual as brands have the opportunity to use large cover photos and videos to promote themselves;
• Brands can now prominently feature their most important tabs at the top of their pages;
• Brands can pin key posts to the top of their pages for up to seven days (i.e., they can highlight important posts for a longer time period); and
• Similar to Twitter, brands can privately message fans (and vice versa), helping Facebook become a more powerful customer service tool.
The new pages are the hub for your brand on Facebook. All of your brand’s Facebook activities, ads and posts originate from your brand page. The brand page is also the key place for you and your fans to communicate, enabling you to foster stronger customer relationships.
Brands now have a platform on Facebook for complete experience optimization — i.e., engaging participants through sights, sounds, words, interactions, ads, games and apps, all in one easy-to-find place. Facebook noted that it wants Timeline for Brands to bring back the relationship between the customer and shopkeeper. The updated brand pages provide a platform for brands to engage with customers on a more personal and relevant level than probably any other platform, including the brand’s own website.
The same day Facebook launched Timeline for Brands, it also announced its new real-time Page Insights. Real-time insights are a game changer as marketers used to have to wait 48 hours for Facebook data.
Facebook Product Manager David Baser recently talked to AdAge about what real-time insights means for brands seeking performance through Facebook pages. Baser maintained that engagement can equal performance if brands are able to leverage real-time participant data to quickly optimize brand pages. For instance, if a brand knows that a certain post is driving a significant number of likes, comments or shares, that brand can quickly pin that post to the top of its brand page.
The new brand pages and real-time insights give brands the opportunity to understand how well they’re interacting with their users and how responsive customers are to the brand. These engagement metrics don’t necessarily directly equate to performance (i.e., sales and leads), but they can help a brand understand its ability to increase the likelihood of performance — e.g., conversions, new customers, improved customer loyalty and increased average order size.
The like button isn’t the only Facebook engagement metric of interest to marketers. Facebook also now reports on various engagement metrics centered on actions. These include the “People Talking About This” metric, which incorporates likes, comments, shares, tags, check-ins and event RSVPs, and the “Engaged Users” metric, which incorporates clicks on links, photos and video views. Performance marketers are focused on collecting and analyzing this engagement data to inform brand page content, make real-time brand page optimization decisions and increase the chance of performance. Brands should consider the following when analyzing their Facebook marketing strategy:
1. Test specific posts (videos, polls, etc.) around new products, promotions and events.
2. Collect engagement data.
3. Measure changes in customer behavior (e.g., sales, leads, new-to-file customers, order size, etc.) based on the data.
Facebook’s new Timeline for Brands enables marketers to foster engagement with participants. This engagement can equal Facebook performance. Brands can separate themselves from the competition by using real-time Facebook engagement data and insights to optimize their brand pages for performance.
Craig Greenfield is the vice president of search and performance media at Performics, the performance marketing arm inside Publicis Groupe’s VivaKi Nerve Center.
