Your Mission If You Choose To Take It…

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You have 30 days to adapt to the new Facebook Page Timeline or perish in Social Network Hell!

Ok, it is not quite that bad.  I woke up this morning to Pandemonium in the Social Traffic Lab Facebook group as Facebook announced in the middle of the night that “Fan Pages” (seems old school now) or Business Pages have 30 days to adapt to the new Timeline features for Pages.

The marketing groups I belong to are up in arms as the default landing tab is being thrown in the trash can requiring brands to actually engage with their fans and create/share content that means something.

Here is my post of thoughts and reactions I have had after reading the Techcrunch and Lujure blog posts:

I just read Lujure’s post on this as well. I was one of the ones that slept in logged in and found all these comments of pandemonium.

Going back to a wider canvas 760 pixels is very good. Optin conversion on the old fan pages were much better than the narrow format we had yesterday.

Losing the default tab is not a big deal. Spencer has been telling us for a while now we should be sending paid traffic to the wall.

Loss of the default tab creates advantages/disadvantages depending on how you look at it.

1) You can still send paid traffic directly to a tab. The skill to be able to send targeted paid traffic has just become more valuable.

2) It requires brands to be more engaging. Transparency and engagement is the new social world we live in whether businesses like it or not.

3) The ability to pin a post to the top of the timeline will be one of the ways we use a call to action to introduce them to the apps from the timeline for casual visitors.

The new timeline cover gives you an opportunity to market timeline cover graphics to businesses. This is a product that is one of the most easily outsourced and possibly easiest done by you with maybe a future tool but has a decent perceived value to the customers. Business trying to create a good looking image in Paint will give up. While you are limited in what you can put in the images, at least you can now have a large beautiful graphic at the top of your page with your business name and branding.

Moving the apps from the left menu to the top navigation as icons is a good thing. The previous text navigation sucks, and having an icon for the 4 featured app will be good.

One of the ways I can think of to help with app discovery if you are running multiple is app navigation built into the apps themselves. Meaning the apps have a menu system to interlink them and provide a consistent integration/interface. One of the benefits of using STL apps in the future I would think.

I like Nathan think this is a good thing overall. They had talked about earlier this year and we speculated it would be coming about this timeframe because of a convention/conference and the IPO.

This will drive more ad spend for Facebook, their revenue source.

But, it will also give the visitor a consistent experience between regular profiles and fan pages which is a very good thing.

With any marketing and design, you should consider the user experience. Some thing we seem to forget. (STL App Interface)

–End Of Post

Here is an example of a new Timeline Page from Macy’s

One of the interesting things for us as app developers is the new app canvas at the moment doesn’t have ads or other distractions.  This is an incredible change if it holds.  Since we no longer have a default tab to work with, it may in order to give app developers an opportunity to create a better user experience within the apps.

Here is an example of Macy’s Ideology Dance Contest App

My reaction in the Facebook Groups:

“If that is the new app page, this change is freaking awesome! 
There are no ads or other navigation on that page other than like, home or pick another app from the dropdown. 
That is going to have an incredible affect on conversions. 
Plus the wider format now gives you enough real estate to work with to create a really good experience with apps.”

Any changes online is an opportunity for those willing to change with it.

For a marketing consultant, this is a huge opportunity.

Change online is inevitable, and businesses need to engage with a quality consultant to guide them and help them adapt when they have 30 days to adapt or die.

During the month of March, Social Traffic Lab will be retooling the existing apps, not only for these changes but also adding additional functionality we already planned for this month.

Hopefully, these insights will prevent you from freaking out too much and help you see the opportunity that these changes have for your business.

Sincerely,
Kevin

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