What are the Results of Using Facebook Timeline for Brands?
Recently Facebook Timeline for Brands, a home page layout for Facebook, became permanent. Wildfire, a social media management platform vendor, soon after released information about how this new page layout has affected not only their pages but other pages as well.
To get an understanding of just how significant the change to Facebook timeline for brands have been, it’s important to look at the past and the current periods to draw some conclusions. For a point of reference, the pages were assessed prior to Timeline being introduced, which was February 29, 2012.
The same pages were also assessed one month after Facebook timeline for brands had officially gone into effect. On a side note, a better picture of the impact of Facebook timeline for brands can be determined with a comparison of pages a month from this day. This length of time would give all compared pages the chance to properly adapt to the changes of Timeline.
Facebook Timeline for Brands | What did these comparisons reveal?
What can be taken away from this snapshot of Timeline’s impact is that unlike long held beliefs, the number of followers or fans to a Facebook page doesn’t speak to how effective your page actually is for Facebook marketing.
What content enjoys the most engagement?
- Data from 4,800 separate Facebook posts over the course of a month showed some very interesting results. From a pre-Facebook timeline for brands perspective, updates to a pages status was the ideal method for getting people to comment on a page or like the page. This social media marketing ploy had a sizeable advantage over the next best post type by almost 5%
- Video post also outperformed the next best type of post as a way to generate shares of your page as well.
- Comparing data post Facebook timeline for brands showed that while status updates were still the top of the heap at raking in the most page likes, photo updates increased marginally at creating comments than status updates. The big winner, however, was videos, which improved at creating shares over photos by an astounding 90%
- The final conclusion that can be made is that for visual media, Timeline works the best. Use as much visual content, pictures and videos on your pages as possible and try to link posts in some way to visual aides to make the most of the benefits Timeline has to offer.
How Facebook Timeline for Brands Affects Pinned and Feature Posts?
Perhaps it’s due to the early stages of Timeline’s implementation, but the effects of pinned or featured posts are somewhat unclear. It’s fairly easy to compare pre Timeline post to featured or pinned post. What this has concluded is that even though featured posts do little in the area of compelling people to comment or like a post or page, they still are the type of format that is shared the most.
Pinned posts, as you’ll find with photos, are excellent for likes and shares. However, it’s important to remember that while these are good for likes and shares, as they are a new way of directing people to apps as opposed to the old standard of liking a post, pinned posts are very likely to disappoint when it comes to evoking comments.
Summary of Facebook Timeline for Brands
The bottom line: If you want to get a significant uptick in page engagement, featured posts that include video is the king right now. Full width, high quality video is what you’ll need to attract page engagement at an unprecedented level. With pinned posts, your best option is to go with photos, as these tend to have the best and most noticeable impact.
Use this information to attract better page engagement. Perhaps with Facebook timeline for brands you’ll use pinning to promote fans for your page or a new product. You might use high quality video or photos to replace status updates in order to increase shares of your page. The choice is yours to make. To view the full research, check out the Wildfire report.