Christian Taylor is founder and CEO of Payvment and developer of the number one Facebook e-commerce platform for brands, agencies and merchants, and the world’s only Facebook Shopping Mall.
Not everyone is cheering over the recent switch to Facebook Timeline for businesses. But the reality is, the new layout will present many great opportunities, particularly if companies properly use it to merchandise their products. So be afraid, if you must, but then check out the three reasons why Facebook’s new brand pages will benefit sellers and social commerce as a whole.
1. It Encourages Fresh Content and Active Conversation
With the new Timeline, business pages now look and behave like personal profile pages. This means a Facebook storefront can no longer be the landing page for new visitors using the old “default tab” setting. While this was useful to ensure more visibility for the storefront, it was also a crutch for not actively creating fresh content, which is the most effective way to drive new traffic to the store.
With the new Timeline layout, building exposure for the storefront and its products will rely on frequently posting promotions and deals. While a post can be “pinned” at the top of the Timeline for up to seven days, smart sellers will create a daily posting plan to develop continuous awareness with their fans. Better yet, they will look for ways to actively encourage comments on their posts by asking questions, creating polls, or publishing other content designed to provoke responses and make their stream an active discussion forum.
2. It Provides a Richer Canvas for Seller Expression
The new Facebook pages give sellers more real estate to showcase their brand and products, starting with the cover photo. While there are some content limitations for the cover photo, it is a really great way to attract new visitors and engage current fans with a core brand message. The ideal dimension for a cover photo is 850 pixels wide by 315 pixels tall, and it’s a good idea to create several for regular rotation.
Storefront applications will also be a more visible part of the page. The old tabs on the left of the page have been replaced by a large 111 pixel by 74 pixel icon that can be placed just under the cover photo. This icon is automatically filled by the storefront application, but the seller has the option to create a custom icon.
The new application canvas for the storefront will also play a larger part. All of the profile information that used to be on the left of the page will move to the top, allowing sellers to deliver an 810 pixel wide experience for shoppers instead of the previous 520 pixels wide. This means more products above the fold, or larger product photos, or both.
3. It Offers Deeper Engagement Insights and Tools
The older version of Facebook Insights did not deliver real-time data, so it could take up to two days to get analytics on a post. With the new Insights, sellers can now track how a post is doing within five to ten minutes after publishing, allowing them to immediately tweak their posts depending on how they are performing. Sellers can then immediately amplify the reach of well-performing posts by turning them into a premium ad or a sponsored story. Some other new or enhanced metrics include:
- People Talking About Engagement: This is the total number of people that have engaged in any way with your page, including users liking your page, commenting on or sharing a post from your page, or answering a question you’ve asked on your page. Sellers can use this to measure engagement with their brand across all Facebook activities and track the success of their programs beyond “likes” and clicks.
- Friends of Fans: This is the total number of friends all your fans have. Sellers can use this to track the growing (or declining) influence of their fan base. As the average goes up, so does the potential reach for a seller’s campaign or promotion.
- Reach: This is the total number of people who have seen content associated with your page. Understanding how far and wide messages are traveling will enable sellers to optimize their content to generate maximum reach.
- Virality: This is the percentage of people who saw a story from your Page and “talked about it.” Again, knowing what’s being shared can help sellers assess what is actually of interest to their fans and customers.
Source: Mashable
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