By Chris Lee

At Facebook’s F8 conference in autumn 2011 it announced Timeline, a page design change aimed at capturing details from user’s life from birth. Users are encouraged to add details and content from their pre-Facebook lives and will comprise of users’ complete status updates. These are soon to become mandatory for users but could also be rolled out for brand pages as well, which could seriously alter some brands’ marketing strategies on Facebook.

Timeline has already been used as a campaign tool, as was the case recently with the Israel Anti-Drug Authority. With this in mind, NMK sought answers from the UK digital community to see what impact Facebook Timeline could have on brands.

Getting engaged

For Trenton Moss, managing director and founder of consultancy Webcredible, Facebook’s new Timeline feature is an attempt by Facebook to maintain customer loyalty and engagement in a space that is becoming increasingly competitive.

“The success of Facebook today is partly due to learnability – the process in which users become familiar with a site, feel it is easy to use, and so use it frequently. By drastically altering these usability attributes, both Facebook and brands who adopt the new layout, run the risk of losing valuable users & customers who are reluctant to the accept the changes to their user experience,” he argued.

Moss said that if Timeline is made available for brand pages, marketers will need to reassess how they use the platform to engage with their target audience. Brands will need to be more strategic in their marketing practices to ensure they are providing valuable content to consumers to prevent them from being pushed off their news feed.

“While some may struggle at first to come to grips with the barriers imposed, the new changes will provide a host of opportunities for brands to better integrate itself into consumer’s lives, from past to present,” he added. “The Timeline will also add a historical perspective to a company helping them to tell its story and ultimately personify the brand to consumers. It will be a great opportunity to create a feeling of nostalgia amongst users and showcase some of the greatest brand moments in history.”

Grand designs

Facebook Timeline for brands is by no means a dead cert for business pages but, given Facebook’s history with design changes it could well be on the horizon, argues Rebecca Quinn of Wildfire Interactive, an app developer for social media sites.

“At its core, Timeline is a chronology of a user’s life on Facebook, with items automatically appearing based on an algorithm intended to capture a user’s most important life events. We can assume that if Timeline were applied to Facebook brand pages, the structure would tell the history of a brand in much the same way,” she told NMK.

The three major features Quinn predicts will be of great importance to marketers seeking to optimise a Timeline profile for their brand are:

1. Cover Art

Where the current brand page has a profile picture and a row of featured photos along the top of the page, the Timeline design instead prominently features an image that is 851 x 315 pixels. This is a very visually striking opportunity to make a big branded impact on visitors and fans that land on the brand page.

2. Application Display

While previously the Facebook profile layout (and the current layout of brand pages) separated different tabs of a profile into a panel of links on the left side of the page, under the picture, Timeline is not arranged in this way. In fact, in its current form, Timeline doesn’t use tabs for information segregation at all. Different pages relating to user information are instead displayed as boxes along the top of the page, under the cover art.

These boxes lead to full-page displays of the individual apps they represent, and are no longer contained in a branded frame (like the branded frame of the profile picture/featured photos combination). For example, the native application “Photos” is contained within a box under the cover photo, and leads to a full-page wide display with the user’s collection of photos and albums.

Should Timeline be applied to brand pages, we can expect that tabs will not be featured there either. This means that brands that have implemented different types of applications to provide interesting content and promotions to their users will need to adapt from building and branding for tab views to building for full-page, unframed viewing. This will likely translate to more opportunity for heavily branded designs and content pages, as when the apps are viewed within Timeline, there is no branding that shows with them in that view (the cover photo shrinks away in application view). Wildfire’s platform of social media marketing tools provides the ability to build and brand to all sizes by default, allowing marketers to create all versions of applications, including for tabs, the canvas, full-page, and mobile environments.

3. Key Events and Milestones

The art of the Timeline experience becomes obvious over time. The architecture is “intelligent,” and will automatically assign more prominence (and thus, page real estate) to events shared on a user’s timeline that were more important. The importance of such events can either be assigned by the user, or is assigned automatically when the post receives higher than average attention from friends, including “likes” and comments. The same will be true of brand pages with Timeline. If implemented, we can expect that brands will have the ability to highlight key events and milestones in their Timelines, calling attention to big achievements or major accomplishments by assigning importance to the relevant updates. Over time, these updates will remain the biggest in the Timeline, visually explaining items of importance to all visiting fans and users over time.