Facebook Timeline for Brands? #facebook #timeline #marketing

Facebook timeline is clearly striking in appearance and has radically altered the way that friends interact with profiles.  Photo’s, videos and stories do stand out more when timeline is switched on, rather than basic status updates do.

But what does this mean for brands?  Firstly timeline is not available for brands –  yet!  And it’s unclear whether brands want to use ‘timeline’.  Although at first glance the layout certainly does appeal to the eye – there are some considerations around the way that timeline operates.

Currently for brand pages, facebook really favours rich media and frictionless sharing (automating posts), but puts little emphasis on posts that are popular – they are simply pushed down in realtime as updates are provided.  However, the new timeline will mean that conversations are greatly favoured, giving specific priority to posts which received the greatest interaction though comments and/or “likes”.

So is timeline actually good for brands?  Would brands want out-of-date but popular posts appearing at the top of their feeds? Or would it place greater pressure on brands to use their facebook pages to publish more engaging content than ever before?  Given that facebook reports 500 million people visit timeline on a peak day and the company stores 1 trillion rows of indexed data – brands are likely to go for the latter!

Read more on timeline here