Almost Everything You Need To Know About The New Timeline For Facebook Pages

The much anticipated Timeline for Facebook Pages launched today. I’ve been watching the Facebook Conference, reading blog posts and hearing people’s opinions all morning and afternoon. Although a lot of people are upset there is no more default landing tabs anymore, I think once you learn about all the new features you’ll be excited about the changes. 

Here is a list of almost all the new feature announced today. If I missed any you feel was important please leave a comment below the post. 

New Facebook Timeline Features:

  • Cover Photo: Facebook recommending to change and customize this often. Example was Verizon photo contest featuring a new users photos on the Cover photo every day. Local businesses could post a picture of their store front to make it easier for customers to find or recognize the location. The ideal cover photo size is 851x315 pixels (min 399 pixels wide).

  • Cover Photo Guidelines: 
    • No price or purchase information, such as “40% off” or “Download it at our website”
    • No contact information, such as web address, email, mailing address or other information intended for your Page’s About section
    • No references to user interface elements, such as Like or Share, or any other Facebook site features
    • No calls to action, such as “Get it now” or “Tell your friends”
  • Profile Picture: Facebook recommends a logo for page and not to change it often. The new dimension is 180x180, the image sizes down as an icon to 32x32 so make sure your profile picture sizes down properly. I noticed that if it’s not the right size it’s becomes a little blurry. 

  • New Landing Page Settings: You can no longer make your landing pages the default landing tab for new visitors. However, you can run ads to these pages and direct them to the page. The new custom page width for Facebook Pages is 810 pixels, more room to work with - which is great! (more on this below)

  • Icon Images For Tabs On Your Timeline: You can add calls to action on your tab icons. The new dimension for the icon is 111x74 pixels.

  • Placement Of About Section: This is the text which goes under your profile picture. You can use this space to describe your company, products or place a call to action. It will display the first 157 of 200 total allowed characters.

  • Pinned Posts: You can now Pin a post at the top of your page for 7 days. Facebook recommends you Pin one important post each week and continue to post updates daily.  
    • Pin a Post to maximize reach and engagement above the fold
    • Pin a Photo album to feature fan of the week
    • Pin a Question to do market research
    • Pin a Video to get more views throughout the week
    • Pin a Event to promote an upcoming workshop or seminar
    • Pin a Offer to get more fans to take advantage of your deal 
       
  • Millstones & Backdated Posts: You can now create the “story” of your business using Timeline by highlight important moments that define your business or organization. You can add or change dates, and highlight posts. 

  • The New “Offer” Update: My favorite new feature. You can now create a deal/coupon as a status update. It’s rolling out over the next few weeks. When a user accept the deal it creates a news story in their Timeline and their friends see it which will create a viral effect.
  • Private Messages Page Admins: You can send and receive private message to page admins. Why hasn’t this been around longer?

  • 5 New Role-Based Admin Settings: There wasn’t a mention of exactly what these features will be, just that they’re coming in the next few weeks (eg, post only, view insights only ect). Again, why hasn’t this been around longer? 

  • Highlighted Friend Activity: When you visit a fan page you will see who you know that also likes the page, and their past activity on the page. Previously this was a sub-tab, now the feature is front and centre on the Timeline.

  • Activity Log: View all your past page posts, hide/remove or change dates of posts.

  • Admin Panel: Find all the communication on the page from one easy to use panel. The panel includes Notifications, Private Messages, New Likes, Insights and Page Tips. 

Major improvements to Facebook Insights: Pure awesomeness. We now have many more useful metrics to work with. Here is what each of them means:

  • Total Likes: How many people Like your page.
     
  • Friends of Fans: All the people you could reach when your fans talk about you. This number represents friends of your fans and your fans combined. 
     
  • People Talking About This: A public metric of people who have talked about your page in the past 7 days. This is an important metric because when people talk about your business or organization it helps you reach their friends. 

    People Talking About This includes:
    • Liking your page
    • Posting on your pages wall
    • Liking/commenting/sharing one of your pages posts
    • Answering a question you posted
    • Responding to one of your event
    • Mentioning your page
    • Photo tagging your page
    • Checking in at your place
    • Recommending your business
  • Weekly Total Reach: Shows the number of unique people who have seen any content associated with your page in the last 7 days. Including any Ads or Sponsored Stories pointing to your page. There are three types of Reach - Organic Reach, Paid Reach and Viral Reach. Note: when you view “Total Reach” it counts total unique Reach, Reach measures the number of people reached. 

  • Engaged Users: The number of people that click on a link you share, Like a post, comment, share, watch a video and even clicking on people’s names on comments or viewing the number of Likes/Shares the post got would also count as engagement.

  • Virality: The amount of unique people who have spread a story from your page post represented by a percentage of the unique people who have seen it. This helps you identify patterns and visually compare the virality of different types of posts. Additionally, the Demographics section now allows you to see the gender and age group of the people who spread your posts the most allowing you to know who to focus on if you’re trying to spread your message further.

  • Frequency: How many times people saw any content from your page.

Note: Facebook Ads now reports “Reach” (total number of unique people reached) instead of “Impressions” (total number of views)

Other cool feature announced today:

  • Ads on Mobile: You can now get your ads to show up on mobile and they will now show up inside Newsfeed’s. There are 425 million monthly mobile users. This is a great feature. 
  • RFD technology: Stores your entire Facebook experience on a chip you can take with you, good for conferences and in-person engagement. Where to get one was not mentioned. 

 

My thoughts on the changes…

The Cover Photo restrictions reminds me of Seth Godin’s “Permission Marketing” principles. I kind of agree with this change as it helps to control the environment on Facebook. Who wants Ads and specials pushes in their face on Facebook all day?

Facebook is a public company now and clearly focusing on driving more ads revenue. They seem to be moving away from allowing businesses to capture fan data to keeping the entire experience on Facebook, which might be good. If they keep the entire checkout on Facebook the conversions will skyrocket. I’m sure in the future customers will be able to make one click purchases using Facebook Credits. It’s coming.

Facebook Landing Page strategies will change for all those who were using the default landing tabs (myself included) and require much more focus on engagement. The bright side is that Facebook has given us better Insights to better engage and understand our customers. 

My only concern is that focusing on Engagement, Reach and People Talking About This is great for large business… Not small business owners. For a large business you can make a big impact with branding and in turn effect your bottom line profits. It doesn’t make sense for small business to focus on branding. Small businesses need better utilize direct response marketing. They need to know if they spend x$ or x time they get x$ in return. This is where features like Offers is great! And the new wider Facebook Landing tabs will be great for increasing conversions through Paid Ads. I’m happy about it.

A major downside to losing default landing tabs is that it closes the viral loop when someone Likes your page and a news story shows up on their Timeline, their friends see it, click, and land on the default Landing Tab. A solution for this is something which I have already started implemented on my Facebook landing pages. A viral “Share” Button which prompts users to share the page for a specific benefits after they have subscribed or opted-into my clients database (which is the main call to action). It’s a 3 step process and here is an example.


 

How to activate Timeline for your Facebook Page. Go to your Fan Page and you will see an “Active Timeline” notification at the top of the page. Click on that and you will get into preview mode and you can begin editing your page. All pages will be published to Timeline on March 30th, 2012. 

Did I miss any features? Enjoy this post? Leave a comment.

How To Remove A Virus From Your Twitter Account And Stop Twitter Spam!

Here is a video I made to show you how to quickly remove Twitter spam if your account is compromised. If you get Direct Message spam just shoot a link back to this video to help your follower remove the virus from their account.

How To Unfollow People On Twitter and Why

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In an effort to make Twitter’s timeline useful again I’m trying a 500 person follow limit. I’ve been thinking about doing this for a long time and finally did it. Does anyone else find there is just too much gibberish on Twitter? It was looking like a self promoting link farm when I looked at it yesterday afternoon…… I may have unfollowed some friends by accident, if I did don’t take offense just lmk, I still love you. 

Why I unfollowed 1200 people

  • Twitter’s timeline wasn’t useful to me anymore. When I first started Twitter I loved checking the timeline because I would learn something new every time. These days it’s just a bunch of links, hashtags and pointless paper.li updates.
  • There was too much noise on the timeline so I avoided looking at it. I found my use of Twitter has changed over the past year from engaging people to waiting for people to engage me. I want to do more of the engaging and learning about the people I follow. 
  • I want to build meaningful relationships (business or personal) with more people. Following 1700 people really wasn’t helping to build quality relationships.

How I chose who to unfollow

I was interested by my self observation with the decision making process. I had a hard time deciding who to follow and who to unfollow. My overall mission was to get the highest quality Twitter timeline with only 500 follows.

  • Does the user have a clear picture of themselves? I unfollowed almost every logo, dogs and cartoon drawing. If I didn’t recognize the avatar I knew it was because that person has never caught my attention or engaged me anyways… Lesson here, your avatar is important. Make sure it’s a clear picture of your face and don’t change it often or you will be hard to remember. 
  • Does the bio say something interesting about who they are and what they do? I once had Owen Clark ask me why I deleted my Twitter bio (this was about 6 months ago). I told him I was checking to see if curiosity would generate more clicks to my website (eg, if people want to know more about me they have to click my web url). Turned out traffic to my blog via Twitter stayed the same, which was interesting. However I’d say it’s better to have the bio and the traffic. I read a lot of bio’s while deciding who to follow/unfollow. 
  • Follower ration. If a user was following 2000 or more people I knew it was unlikely they would see much of me… However I was more interested in what they were tweeting about. After all, the goal here is to get the optimal timeline. I found most people who followed 2000 people and had half as many followers tended to be the ones sharing a bunch of self promotional tweets. Coincidence, I dunno. 

How I unfollowed 1200 peeps

First thing I did was created a Twitter List of all the people I wanted to make sure I didn’t accidentally unfollow. Sometimes when using unfollow tools you may accidentally unfollow friends, so I recommend creating a list of your favorite peeps first. Later, you can come back to check it and make sure you didn’t unfollow any friends. 

The first tool I used was TheTwitCleaner.com this tool was able to give me recommendations of who to unfollow based on their activity. You get categories such as: do they only share links, do they post identical tweets, are they victims of app spam ect. This was a good first start but only eliminated about 100 users. 

The main tool I used for unfollowing was ManageTwitter.com with this tool you can unfollow all those who are not following you, those who talk too much and those who talk too little. I’ve created this video below to show you how to use it more effectively. 

[coming soon]

I was able to use TheTwitCleaner and ManageTwitter to clean up more then half my timeline. Once I was down to about 700 I went on to Twitter.com and started manually unfollowing. What I found really handy was the Klout browser plugin (for Chrome and Firefox) which allowed me to view users Klout scores from Twitter.com. I looked for those with low -20 and high 50+ Klout scores. 

What Klout scores tell me

  1. The user has a good follower ration
  2. The user is a regular Twitter user
  3. The user is engaged and engages
  4. The user is probably retweeted often (shares good content)
  5. 50+ the user engages with influential people 
  6. -20 the user is new to Twitter but doing a good job
  7. -10 they aren’t really using Twitter

(these are all guesstimates)  

I won’t get too much into Klout but I do recommend using the plugin and looking at scores with a grain of salt. It’s not everything but it’s helpful to see. 

Who am I following and why

You can view the list of 500 people I followed

I kept these people for a number of reasons

  • I know them personally and like them
  • They share unique content on Twitter which is not on their blog or Facebook
  • They share links I’m interested in (eg, tech/marketing/business related)
  • They tweet about topics I’m interested in
  • They don’t promote themselves all day long
  • They are not Paper.li, #FF and Foursquare addicts 
  • We have had recent conversations together 

In conclusion.

I know a lot of people are wondering why I don’t just use a dashboard like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck and manage Twitter Lists. I never got used to using a dashboard and prefer using Twitter.com

Abby from @ArtsVancouver suggest bookmarking a Twitter List page on my browser. I think this is a brilliant idea and will probably do this next.

I have a feeling the 500 follow limit will make Twitters timeline interesting again. I have lost about 25 followers so far, I am sure I will lose more as I continue tweeting and people notice I’m not following them. However I consider this and decided if people are only following me because I’m following them they probably don’t care much about me anyways ;)

 

This may very well be one of the best social media campaigns I’ve seen come out of a large corporation. What makes it great is the tiny personalized interactions (which I talk a lot about in my presentation “Secrets Of A Social Media Campaign”).

When you make ONE person a huge fan of your company they forever help spread the word about every other great thing you do. Take advice from this video then next time you plan a social media campaign. 

The Original Dropbox Homepage Video

Now valued at over a billion dollars, Dropbox is another lean tech startup success story. However the company didn’t have an easy start. If you use the product you know it’s not easy explaining the product to someone, or get them to download it to their computer. 

The video above was made by Dropbox founder and CEO Drew Houston. The video is simple, however what made the video so successful was the tiny humorous details. Pay close attention to the file names, IM chat, pictures and email addresses for a good laugh.

This is the video knows as the MVP, “Minimum Viable Product” that helps Dropbox get to where it is today. Simple, yet effective.