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Facebook, the social networking company that has become increasingly important to businesses and their brands, is instituting mandatory changes that will alter the look of company profile pages starting Friday.
The new “timeline” profile page layout allows businesses, brands and organizations to express themselves more visually to boost the amount of time people spend looking at the pages. But the changes also remove a popular marketing feature that helps drive people to those pages, marketers said.
Facebook introduced the timeline-style profile pages for brands in February, but switching to the new layout was optional. All brand pages will forcibly convert to timeline starting Friday.
The brand page redesign has “huge potential,” but businesses need to be proactive about upgrading to the new layout, said David Bowman, chief marketing strategist for the Ohlmann Group, a Dayton marketing communications firm.
“There is a lot of discussion about it because Facebook is such a large entity and most people interact with it both from a business and personal perspective regularly,” Bowman said.
The social networking company had 845 million monthly active users and posted $3.7 billion in sales last year.
Facebook brand pages were introduced in 2007 to allow public figures, businesses, brands, organizations or charities to create a presence and communicate with people. At then end of 2011, there were more than 37 million brand pages.
Timeline features include a large cover photo at the top of the page, the ability to keep a story at the top of the page for up to seven days, and controls for page administrators to track their performance and to respond to private messages from people.
Creating a cover photo was the most time-intensive part of switching to a timeline profile, said Missy Davish, a graphic designer at Insignia Signs in West Carrollton.
“It is quite a lot of space for a marketing opportunity, so we really wanted to make sure that it reflected our company and our branding,” she said.
Some marketers have complained that the redesign eliminates default landing tabs, a welcome application for non-fans that teased special content such as contests or coupons, but required users to “Like” the page for access. Some businesses use the number of likes they receive as a marketing tool.
Bowman said the change will improve user experience, but he expects to see “like-gating” to return in some fashion. “You can expect that people will find ways to work around that to incorporate that technology into it,” he said.
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2419 or dlarsen@DaytonDailyNews.com.
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