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2. Using the Benefits of
Facebook Timeline
for Brands to Your
Advantage

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. This length of time would give all
compared pages the chance to
properly adapt to the changes of
Timeline.

7. Facebook Timeline for Brands
| What did these comparisons
reveal?

8. 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.

9. What content enjoys the most
engagement?
Data from 4,800 separate Facebook
posts over the course of a month
showed some very interesting
results.

10.  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%

11.  Video post also outperformed the
next best type of post as a way to
generate shares of your page as well.

12.  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%

13.  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.

14. 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.

15. 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.

16. 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.

17. 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.

18. 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.

19. 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.

20. 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.