New Facebook Pages Timeline: Covers, Content explained

Business Owners, Marketers and brand managers are you still digesting yesterday’s news about the launch of timeline for pages? Well here are some tips and food for thought to help avoid indigestion.

Target The News Feed With Interesting Posts
With a high percentage of user interaction occurring in the news feed, sharing fresh content and giving Facebook users reasons to engage with that content is vital.
 
Build Relationships Before Selling - You can’t just treat Facebook as a forum for pushing sales without having a conversation first. Connect with your current an potential customers, treating them as people, not ways to make money.
 
Embrace Your Past - Take advantage of the back-dating capabilities of timeline. Including company milestones such as founding year, milestone sales, product or service introductions, expansions, moves, and other key events.


Manage Private Conversations - The first key thing to know about brand messaging is that users must initiate the conversation. And, secondly, brands can only send two messages to users for every one message received from the user. This is to prevent spammers from overwhelming users with sales and marketing messages. In brief, keep it classy. When a user reaches out to you, that’s an authentic, personal experience that you should treat in the same way as a face-to-face conversation.
 
Cover Photos - Get creative! users will enjoy visiting your timeline. Your business surely has plenty of images ready to represent your brand on Facebook. But remember to follow the rules below.

Official Facebook rules - No purchase info: The cover photo is a place to demonstrate the brand’s personality, not to deliver a sales pitch. No contact info: The rules explicitly prohibit contact info in the cover photo. Not a big deal though the about section below the cover photo should this information. Also the pinned post is the ideal place for this kind of promotional content and advertising, see the section below on pinning. No Facebook actions: With the old Facebook pages, you might have created a landing page with an arrow pointing to the Like button. Now, with Facebook action requests banned from the cover photo, you can’t ask or instruct fans to like your page. No calls to action at all: You cannot ask them or instruct them to do anything: no purchase info, no contact info, no Facebook actions... no calls to action at all.. No lying: This should be a policy for every one when interacting with customers period, but Facebook has outlined it as a specific rule for cover photos. Don’t promise anything you shouldn’t be promising.


 
Pinning - By highlighting your post this way causes it to stay at the top of your timeline for exactly one week, whether there are new posts or not. Do you want a certain photo or promotion to be highly visible to visitors of your page? then pinning is the ideal way to do this.

Here are some examples of how to use pins:
1. Post a coupon for 25% off special items.
2. Display special office hours.
3. Share a special post.


Starring - By highlighting your post this way causes its width across the page, making it more visible as visitors view your timeline. Because this high visablity, you’ll definitely want to save this feature for your absolutely best posts, and the ones that you don’t want any of your customers and prospects to miss.

Here are some examples of how to use stars:
a. Post about a new product or service.
b. A milestone event.
c. Photos from a recent event.