Facebook is famous, or perhaps infamous, for the constant changes to its interface. Every few months, a new feature or layout is introduced, often to the ire of its users. But the most recent change to Facebook Pages, its platform for businesses and other brands, is a welcome change.
In the development of digital marketing, we’ve seen a progression from website to online audio and video, and eventually to social media. However, most businesses are still struggling to leverage the social space to their greatest advantage. Most small companies lack the time to invest in developing a social strategy or the money to hire someone to do it for them. What Facebook has done is deliver a prepackaged digital strategy directly to its business users. It’s called Timeline for Pages.
In the fall of 2011, Timeline was introduced to personal Facebook accounts, allowing users to create a digital scrapbook of sorts. It automatically catalogues all of the content a user puts into Facebook, but also allows for the addition of content along the timeline all the way back to a user’s birth year. While personal users have had mixed reactions to Timeline, this could be a great tool for businesses trying to implement a social strategy. Many organizations struggle when trying to sing their own praises or talk about their history. With Facebook Timeline, your page does that work for you.
In addition to cataloguing the content you’ve already posted to Facebook over the last few years, you can add content along the entire history of your business from its founding until today—just like the personal Timeline. There are so many ways a business can utilize this new feature. The most obvious is to create an online history of your business, highlighting important dates like its founding, moves from one location to another, and growth in employees and/or sales.
Businesses can also use Timeline to track customer testimonials. This can be accomplished by “highlighting” specific posts along your Timeline or by linking directly to individual posts. Timeline can also help you build frequently asked questions, or an FAQ, for your customers. As questions on your page are asked and answered, those posts are stored on your Timeline indefinitely, allowing you to directly link to them from a special section of your page or directly from your website. This can save time and effort by building an FAQ organically from real questions your customers have asked while at the same time highlighting the customer service skills and expertise of you and your staff.
We at The Heartland Partnership family of companies will be developing our pages to highlight important events and developments over the course of time here in central Illinois. Through the records of the now century-old Peoria Area Chamber of Commerce and our other organizations, we plan to create a living history of business and development in the region. We also invite you to share with us, and our timeline, historical items from the area’s history. iBi
