What’s Not Good About The New Timeline For Pages

Posted in Facebook by Somesh

Well, as it was expected the Timeline type pages have made their debut and it brings with it a lot of new features – some good, some bad for social media marketers. Timeline for pages is Facebook’s effort to provide a consistent experience to users on Facebook, and at the same time provide more opportunities for brands to initiate a more social interaction with its fans. It also comes out as a pretty good microsite for brands.

New features like Cover photos, Milestones, Star posts, Pinned posts are beautiful additions, no doubt. You can also read this helpful blog post by Likeable to learn more about that. But what I want to talk about is some serious issues/challenges which brands might face because of these new upgrades.

[image courtesy:yhyqart.com]

No Landing pages:

Gone are the good old days of creating an appealing landing page which used to welcome fans, ask them to LIKE your page, announce an offer, etc. Now a page is like an open book with no cover. Fans will directly bump onto your page and can start liking, commenting, and sharing. This, to me , is a serious matter of concern because there are high chances that good amount of people who come to your page after clicking your ad will simply ignore the tiny LIKE button which is on bottom right of your cover photo. Your CPC is bound to get affected because of this (negatively).

No room for call-to-action:

If you’re thinking that we will use the cover photo to put a call-to-action line, LIKE us now arrow pointing towards the Like button below, or promote our website url, or any other offer then let me bring you back to reality, because unfortunately Facebook Page terms do not allow you to do so.

Covers may not include:

i. price or purchase information, such as “40% off” or “Download it on socialmusic.com”;

ii. contact information such as a website address, email, mailing address, or information that should go in your Page’s “About” section;

iii. references to Facebook features or actions, such as “Like” or “Share” or an arrow pointing from the cover photo to any of these features; or

iv. calls to action, such as “Get it now” or “Tell your friends.”

Now, we can choose to disregard these at our own risk, or figure out some smart designs which fits in terms and also helps us with a call-to-action.

Only 3 apps will feature on the page:

The new design leaves room for only 4 apps/tabs which can be featured on your page, one of them is permanent and we can’t change it, and that is PHOTOS. We can play with rest of the 3. The old design gave space for 4 extra tabs. It may seem that this shouldn’t matter but wait, think over it. Out of the 3 options available you might want to use 1 for featuring no. of fans that your page has. Okay, the number of fans is featured right next to the profile picture but that’s too small I believe. Highlighting big fan numbers in bold does help to get fan’s attention and make him/her believe that you have a huge fan following.

So, we are left with only 2 tab options.

These were a few concerns which I have, and you might experience these soon if you manage a page.

So, what is Facebook trying to do here? On one hand it makes us run Facebook ads to get fans on the page, and on other hand it stops us from welcoming them with a landing page. We can’t even use cover photos to ask them to LIKE us. Advertisers will surely lose out on some converts here.

But Facebook is playing a real smart game here to boost its ad revenue. By restricting us with annoying page terms, it is pushing us to try out its new ad features like the Reach generator, News feed ads, and ads when you log out. These new ad types ensure better reach. Don’t worry if you have big ad pockets, but worry if you don’t!

What are your thoughts on new Timeline Pages? Any other concerns which bother you? Do share it with us in comments box below. You can also tweet to me @isomesh

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