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If I read another post about how Facebook’s move to turn all brand pages to “Timeline” is so wonderful for marketers, my eyes might fall out from involentary eye rolling so much.
Now, there are a few types of brands who greatly benefit from Timeline. Notice I say “who” because the brands that can benefit from this change are brands that are about people. From Musicians to Livestrong, these brands ongoing content and, most importantly, a history of engaging with fans through conversation. This is because Timeline was designed to tell the story of a person’s life, from their birth to, well, their death. I have issues with the Timeline UI to begin with for that purpose, but at least it makes sense for a person. However, not every brand wants their audience to remember who they were 50, 20, 5, or even 1 year ago. (Re)branding agencies are a big business for that reason.
Brands like Macy’s, which have a stable brand image and message that hasn’t changed through the years, have clearly heavily invested in Facebook timeline for their launch, likely with a lot of help from Facebook and an (Facebook recommended?) agency, to create a quality profile that dates back to their first store. Even in this case that’s really cool in concept, I question how many people are going to scroll back in time to learn more about Macy’s on Facebook? It’s more an expensive filler to fit the new format than content people will engage in. The company, however, is on the right track with Timeline. It realizes just how heavy the investment in social content marketing needs to be to keep up with this new format. Not all brands can successfully do this.
Meanwhile, I’ve seen the Fanta page in Timeline — clearly their legacy was not so intriguing — so they created a “find Fanta thoughout history” concept, which I’m sure spent a lot of time and planning on, and it’s TBD whether anyone cares to engage with that content. Their latest post seems to have 0 comments and 12 likes. Notice the spam comments on the post in the upper right. More on that later.
The bigger issue I have with Timeline, and all the “ooh” and “awwing” over how wonderful it is for brands, is that the transition to Timeline did not occur because Mark Zuckerberg and team thought to themselves, golly gee, let’s make the brand experience better on Facebook so they can market to their audience for free.
Facebook, more than ever as it goes public, needs to ramp up on its advertising growth. The network can only sustain “people” growth for so long, the real growth over the long term comes from showing more ads and increasing the cost of those ads.
Those kids over at the FB are smart. They know how to create and sell highly-effective advertising. Sponsored stories are a huge part of that. They’re quite brilliant, and they work. Your friend wrote a comment on a brand, now that brand can highlight that story as a comment to that person’s friend network, and so on. The ads will get clicked, which means higher CPC rates, and it’s possible that even those ads do end up converting more for brands. That’s all fine and dandy, but no one should be fooled into thinking the change for brands to Timeline is really about helping brands create engaging content and to reach their audience for free.
Facebook had a problem with traditional brand pages, and they weren’t the ideal option for brands either. The current brand pages allow brands to create somewhat interactive experiences on them, often designed by a slew of agencies that have built their entire platform on creating content for pages, but those pages rarely got noticed by fans. There are stats that show only 1% of people who like a brand or product ever go back to their page. I’m not arguing that the current setup was perfect, but it at least gave brands the potential of converting their audience by employing clever campaigns.
Now, Facebook moves brands to Timeline, and everyone is infatuated by how brands can add a pretty photo to the top of their page, just like a user, and if they design it well their page can look nice at a first glance. Facebook is showing off pages in Timeline such as Coca Cola and Coldplay that really look great, especially if you zoom out.
The big problem is that Timeline itself is a bit of a mess. I have a little bit of beef with Javascript coders who think that just because they can automatically arrange content in a way that fits in a page, it is the right way to display that content. For instance, on my Facebook profile, there is a big box of Superbowl ads that I watched… a good month ago… as well as a second box under it of the same ads, tagged as videos, that I watched, which for some reason hasn’t been bumped down my profile because it’s old. There’s a lot of these experiences that clearly haven’t been thought through when Timeline was designed because some Javascript engineer fell in love with how he was able to effectively display a whole lot of content from different sources.
At the same time, even if Timeline does exactly what it is supposed to do for brands (get a lot of comments on posts so a few can be used as sponsored stories), there is an even bigger problem of all the spam this creates. This may not be as bad for brands as it is for a personal account (I now have almost 70,000 Facebook subscribers and the experience of reading through my comments is nothing short of pure comedy), but it is still a serious concern for brands. Facebook’s current brand page lets brands determine what they want to surface when someone first comes to that page. The wall itself hid comments successfully, which did not inspire conversation, but also did not open up the brand to a slew of negative and spam posts.
Negative posts on their own are not terrible — it’s great to engage customers on sites like Twitter who offer negative reviews of their experiences, turning a negative into a positive, but when you get on Facebook, it’s just overwhelming. On Twitter it’s pretty easy to ignore a post, but on Facebook all of the comments are right there on your posts, public for anyone to see. If you don’t respond to a complaint, this is bad social practice, but outside of heavily investing in a team to manage your Facebook page, how can anyone ever keep up? That doesn’t even take into consideration all of the actual spam, pornographic comments, and posts in foreign characters that turn out to be gobblygook.
I’m all for engaging with your audience, and think conversations are a key part of the social experience. But I’m worried for brands. I’m worried that brands aren’t going to get just how important it is to invest in someone or someones to manage their social media presence on Facebook wisely before it’s too late.
On the same note, this transition brings the ability for anyone to message a brand directly. Unlike prior Facebook pages, where you could not directly reach your fans, this allows brands to respond to anyone who directly messages them. If this works as well as I think it will, this is another huge problem for companies — how do you handle the influx of messages from Facebook? How many do you respond to? How many do you ignore? How many are spam and just going to waste your time?
The bottom line is that engaging with your brand fans via conversation is not inherently and awful idea, but the way it’s set up in Facebook leaves brands in a tricky boat. The articles I read on how absolutely wonderful this change is come from either social media journalists and bloggers who get that the current Facebook pages aren’t working, so they’re excited about any change at all, or, more often, from agencies that are going to make bank on this huge transition. And yes, I do recommend you invest in a good social agency to help you with this, because it’s a huge challenge to get right. You might have had one person managing your Facebook page before that featured a contest or promotion every month, but now you need a team of individuals to update content frequently, respond to your audience, and if you really want to do this right, actively delete spam posts. I don’t know exactly how many people need to be on that team, but it’s definitely not just one person.
It’s most important to be clear that Facebook make this transition for the following reasons, none of which are to “benefit brands.”
- 1. Facebook doesn’t want to invest its development resouces into building a sucessful page program for brands where they can actually engage with their audience. Facebook is focusing its development on Timeline profiles, which are designed for its users, and it’s moving brands to this layout because they do not need to invest other resources into a product that does not directly drive advertising revenue.
- 2. Facebook needs to make more money via advertising quarter over quarter. Again, they can only grow their audience by so many people at a certain point, especially in high-value ad-targeting regions such as the US and Europe. Sponsored stories is Facebook’s next golden ticket to growth. But in order to have sponsored stories to sell, Facebook must help brands increase comments about their brand. They are going to do this by forcing brands to post frequently to their Timeline, and solicit comments.
- 3. Alone, encoraging customer conversations is not awful (it’s actually great for brands if managed properly) — conversations via social channels are smart, and it’s great that Facebook is making it easier for brands to connect with their audience. The reality is, however, that “easy” comes with a price. Facebook is “watching” everything your audience does and says. The company has a huge team of genius data analysts who can just as easily take your audience and allow your competitor who wants to target that audience, just like you do. You will never own this data, or your audience, despite the giant investment you will need to make to properly keep up with your page. Facebook will own the data, and just like your competitors, you will need to rent it back for a marked-up cost.
- 4. Facebook wants to hold brand content hostage. It will surface content in the walls of your audience insofar as it drives enough contributions and commentary to provide content for sponsored stories. Eventually, if you don’t pay up, I’d only guess that Facebook is going to give your content less priority in the ever-cluttered Facebook wall. If you plan to pay up, great. But at some point you need to think about how much driving your audience back to your site is worth, versus investing in keeping your customers happy on your site, and wanting to come back because you have an engaging experience there already.
- 5. There is a lot more reasonsing behind the change that as a non-employee of Facebook I can only guess at, but I wouldn’t trust Facebook to stick with any program that is not driving revenue for their advertising programs. They have to do this. It’s not a bad strategy for Facebook, it’s not something you can ignore, but brands should not attempt this alone, and should be careful before heavily investing in creating a Timeline that tracks back to their first store in 1776. I’m sure the company has quite a bit of brilliant advertising technology and experiences up their sleeves to roll out, and it will be brands that foot the bill. While you’re saving your budgeting pennies to support this, pay close attention to ROI, and also make sure to understand that everything you do to create and encourage content generation on Facebook is more data that the company can use to sell ads to your competitors. I don’t have an answer for how to avoid this, and as a social strategist, cannot tell you shut down your Facebook page. If you’re a legitamite brand you need to be there, and you must start thinking about Facebook engagement differently. Just go into this with an understanding that Facebook is not doing something really cool for brands and marketers, they are doing something that saves them a lot of money in development time, while at the same time making them a lot of money in advertising.
The entire strategy that Facebook has reminds me a lot of AOL in the early days. Are walled gardens back in style? I don’t think so, but for the time being, Facebook has the eyeballs, and is an extremely powerful advertising platform, especially for a B2C audience. Time will tell if this transition to Timeline actually benefits brands, but I’d put my money on the only folks benefiting from this change being the people at Facebook, agencies that can handle the constant content and moderation requirements as well as creative strategy, and community managers, who will find an increase in the number of job postings at all the major companies around the globe.
What do you think? Is Timeline really a good move for brands?
My phone beeps at me as I’m driving down the street, and I open it to see the VP of Business Development of America Online is nearby. I don’t know exactly where he is — maybe in a house I’m driving past, or a car going the other direction. He’s not a friend of mine, in fact, I’ve never met him before. We just both happen to be on Highlight, the new mobile app that takes location-based services to new, kind of creepy, kind of cool heights.
