Facebook Rolls Out New Brand Page Design

Similar to the design changes implemented to personal Facebook profiles several months back, on Friday February 11,  Facebook announced a similar redesign for business Pages.

The new look of business pages is currently available for voluntary upgrade, but it will be rolled out to all business pages on March 10.  We recommend you wait for a few days to upgrade to the new Facebook page design since we noticed some bugs with the new page design that affect Facebook tab applications. We’re confident that Facebook will fix these issues in the coming days.

What has changed:

1) Tab applications move to sidebar: Instead of the horizontal tabs on the top of the page that used to accommodate the “Wall” and “Info” tabs and all outside applications, users will now navigate between views using a vertical panel of links to the left of the wall.

2) New photo strip at top of page: Similar to personal profiles, Facebook Pages will now have a more prominent photo strip running horizontally across the top of the page that will display photos by those most recently tagged with the brand.

3) Profile picture reduced: Where previously the dimensions of the profile picture were 200 x 600 pixels, the new design only accommodates pictures that are 180 x 540 pixels.

4) Information Box Relocation: The little box meant for a brief blurb about the brand, which was previously right below the profile picture, has been removed and placed into the “Info” tab.

5) Featured Favorites: Facebook has extended the communications abilities you have as a brand. Where before, you could only list other pages on the network as your page’s “Favorites,” now, you can actually “Like” them, behaving just like a user would (including being able to leave comments as your page on other pages).

6) Featured Pages and Admins: Now, you can show “Featured Likes” and “Page Owners” on the left hand side portion of the brand’s Facebook Page. “Featured Likes” will show other Facebook Pages you have liked and “Page Owners” will list other “featured” Page admins (you don’t have to display all of them, just the ones you want users to see) on the page just below the “Featured Likes” tab.

7) Editable Page Category: Previously, when setting up a Facebook page, you had to choose the category your brand falls under at startup, and once chosen, it could not be changed. With the redesign, you can edit the category and the sub-category in your page settings, for better accuracy!

8) De-Clutter the Wall: the redesign allows for easy moderation options, including setting the Wall to display posts made by “Everyone” or just those made by the “Page.” Users can still respond to the posts made by the Page only, so many profile admins allow only posts made by the Page to de-clutter the wall.

9) Mutual Friends and Mutual Interests: the newly redesigned pages feature sections on the right that call out Mutual Friends (that also like that page) and mutual interests (between the visiting user and the Page’s “Liked” pages.)

10) Interact as your Page: A completely new feature, Facebook has added the ability to interact with items around the social network as the brand page. In this way, you can “Like” other brand pages, interact on their Walls, and have those interactions be from your brand page, instead of your personal profile. We think this will be a great way to increase your brand awareness, by tactfully interacting with other pages and people who are influencers.

11) Enhanced 2-way communications: To enhance responsiveness or just to keep admins more in the loop, you will be able to set up notifications of page activity that go to your email, such as any new Wall posts made by fans. There are also enhanced moderation/spam settings so that you can specify lists of words or terms you want blocked from showing up from your Facebook Page wall if written in a comment by a misbehaved fan. In addition, the admin’s newsfeed will contain streaming content of activity going on from the brand page.

12) iFrame Support: Facebook has indicated that while FBML apps will remain functional for the time being, eventually they are looking to phase out FBML as the development option for applications within tabs on Facebook, moving instead to iFrames. This means that the way developers build applications on Page tabs will be consistent with the dominant way they are built on canvas pages. All Wildfire applications will remain compliant with new and previous Facebook standards and operate functionally throughout.

All in all, the changes to the business profile, which you can read about in depth here and here, are designed to better integrate brand Pages users’ experience with the rest of their time spent on Facebook. Our recommendation remains to wait on upgrading to these changes, to make sure every functionality and feature shakes out and becomes well known in time for the March 10th total roll out. As always, we will work our hardest to keep you in the know of any changes and enhancements made to Facebook’s platform.

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4 Tips You Can’t Afford to Miss When Planning Your 2011 Social MediaStrategy

Carefully planning a social media strategy for your brand is essential to success. Having run thousands of highly successful promotions for some of the biggest brands in the world, we have compiled 4 strategic tips that you can’t afford to miss when crafting your own social media plan through 2011.

1) Create a social media marketing Calendar:
When it comes to building an engaged fan base, regular interactions like daily status updates and weekly promotions are hugely important but so too are seasonal marketing opportunities like holidays, events and other widely-known annual milestones. There are all sorts of days throughout the year that provide opportunities to engage consumers — from holidays like Valentines Day, Easter and Hanukkah to ‘cause-related’ days like Earth Day, May Day and ‘bike to work’ day. There are also seasonal ‘events’ like ‘back to school’, Black Friday, the start of the football season, and there are even special events like the Olympics and the presidential elections. All of these provide powerful opportunities for companies to build a relationship with consumers and to market themselves. Unless you have a plan, however, it's easy to forget these holidays and events until it's too late. We recommend that you put together a calendar of all the holidays and events that you’d like to market around this year, that way you wont forget. Remember, planning for these kinds of marketing campaigns should start several weeks or even months in advance so don’t forget to mark on your calendar when you're planning for a given holiday should begin. As for what you should do to celebrate these holidays, promotions like contests, coupons, sweepstakes and giveaways continue to be the #1 method for successful fan growth and engagement on Facebook and they are particularly relevant when it comes to holidays and events.

2) Start measuring and optimizing your brand presence now:
As with all forms of online marketing, to be successful in social media marketing, you’ve got to measure your activities to learn what works and what doesn’t. For example, you should try messaging your fans at various different times of the day to see what results in the highest engagement, that way you’ll know the best time to message your fans going forward. There are various different tools that you can use to measure your social media marketing performance. Within Facebook itself, you can use the “Insights” tool to see all sorts of metrics about your Brand Page interactions including your post popularity, its reach and the amount of impressions it generated. Outside of Facebook you can monitor your brand presence in comparison to other brands (like those of your competitors) to get an idea of what they might be doing right, so that you might draw some inspiration for your own page. For example, if you see that a competitor has a sudden acceleration in its fan growth you can look at this company’s fan page to see what they did to boost the growth. Wildfire provides a free tool that can be used to monitor brand presence on both Facebook and Twitter, called the Wildfire Monitor. Use tools like Facebook Insights and Wildfire Monitor to understand what works best for you and your competitors and then incorporate this into your marketing plan!

3) Keep users engaged in between campaigns
While promotions are the #1 reason that consumers ‘like’ brands and are a great way to keep consumers ‘coming back’, it’s important that you keep users engaged in between promotions with interesting and regularly updated content. Update your brand page consistently, at least several times a week, with interesting content such as links to relevant media stories, interesting news about your brand, information about the industry in which your brand operates or about the community in which your business exists. For example, if you’re a gym or a spa you could provide health and wellness tips. If you’re a hotel why not message fans about great events happening in your region? Content you link to doesn’t necessarily need to be specifically about your own brand—in fact, recent studies have shown that Facebook dominates sharing in general, with 44% of all sharing volume occurring through Facebook. People are using Facebook to broadcast interesting things to each other— your brand can be a part of that, all the while encouraging interesting conversations and raising impressions. 

Another excellent way to encourage interaction and sharing among your social media fans is to reward them for committing to “Like” your brand! Rewards can be tangible or intangible— for example, exclusive access to special deals and discounts is certainly a reward for a fan’s commitment. Companies like Rue La La and Sprinkles Cupcakes have great examples of fan rewards: Rue La La announced a surprise Facebook Fan Only sale that could only be accessed from its Facebook Page by fans of Rue La La (even website members, if they had not yet committed their “Like” on Facebook, could not access the special deal!). Sprinkles Cupcakes posts a daily “Secret Phrase” to their wall (which can only be seen by users visiting their Fan Page) that, if whispered to a Sprinkles cashier, earns the first 25 people doing so a free cupcake! Both of these exclusive rewards served to drive sales for both brands at a minimal cost to each company.

4) Ongoing interaction is the key to a sustained conversation with your followers:

While planning campaigns around holidays can be highly effective, so too can running small, regular campaigns that consistently remind fans about your brand page and keep them coming back. For example, if you're a clothing retailer, make it a tradition to have a clothing item giveaway or a clothing photo share day once a week, every week. Your fans will come to know that Friday’s are “Fashion Tip Fridays” on your Fan Page, and they’ll interact readily with your brand when you post pictures of stylish fashion items or ask them to post their favorite fashionable looks for that week. 

Do you do Taco Tuesdays or Half Price Cocktail Wednesdays at your restaurant? Translate these weekly ‘specials’ into your Facebook marketing to keep fans engaged, encourage in-store visits and facilitate sharing. For example, to celebrate Taco Tuesdays you could offer a weekly 2-for-1 taco deal for the first 50 consumers to grab your coupon. Or, to celebrate cocktail Wednesdays you could share a different cocktail recipe every week and offer up this cocktail for half price to any Facebook fans who order it on the featured Wednesday. No matter what your brand does, find a way to engage your users in a consistent interaction with your brand, using quirky and fun social initiatives and constant messaging.

Now that you’re armed with some of the greatest tricks of the trade, get to work! Are you planning any initiatives for your marketing calendar that we didn’t mention in this post?  Share them in the comments!

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CASE STUDY: Great Facebook Marketing Strategy from Art.com

At Wildfire, we do our best to provide our users and readers with actionable tips and advice that will help them supercharge their social media marketing strategy. Sometimes, however, the best education comes from inspiration. In this post, we will take a look at how one internet retail company, Art.com, has established a sustainable and successful year-round social media strategy.

Art.com is the world’s largest retailer of art and wall decor, with over one million pieces. It encompasses 2 brands that each have Facebook pages, Art.com and Allposters.com (the “world’s largest poster and print store”). Both brand pages have major social appeal, consistently sharing items with their community that influence interactions and user dialogue, not to mention an increased loyalty of the brand. Here are some of the ‘secrets’ to Art.com’s success:

Consistent and relevant interactions

Art.com and Allposters.com both consistently post relevant and interesting updates and messages to their fan communities on Facebook. Art.com averages about two posts per day, and posts are always highly tied to their art loving community with an image included or link attached. The brand crafts messages that include interesting background on the art and artists they discuss, as well as messages that end with a question, spurring audience response. Most updates also reference outside write-ups and scholarly resources, as the brand understands that this is the type of content that the Art.com fan community will find highly relevant.

Places to Go and Things to Do

New Facebook brand pages have several default tabs for administrators to fill out when starting up profiles. However, leaving just those default tabs can make for a pretty drab visiting experience for users dropping by to check out the brand presence. Art.com and Allposters.com both have added customized tabs with interesting content, giving visiting users more places to interact, browse, and create conversations. Both pages hold promotions consistently over the year to rotate new interaction activities through the page. Both pages also have some visually interesting tabs with community specific content, like the Marvel Comics superheroes trivia on AllPosters.com as well as the introduction of the French Museum collection in a custom tab on Art.com’s page.

Consistent and Routine Promotions Over Time

While launching one “big-bang” campaign for your brand can be initially successful, the growth in community  and gains in user loyalty fade quickly over time without consistent upkeep. This upkeep can be accomplished by repeatedly running new promotions, keeping users returning for more chances to interact or win cool prizes. The Art.com brand pages have served their fans many promotions throughout the year, of varying formats and with changing focuses. Some past promotions included, “America’s Next Master Artist” photo contest, a “Which Art Movement Are You?” quiz, an “AllPosters Twilight Eclipse Sweepstakes,” a “Home Decor Personality” quiz, and many others.

Timely and Relevant Updates to Profile

In addition to consistently running promotions, Art.com and AllPosters.com will make timely and relevant updates or changes to their profiles over the course of the year. While it is a simple change, swapping in a new profile picture with snowflakes or ornaments in its background in time with the holiday season will make the update get driven into the newsfeeds of fans, and is a refreshing and surprising change to keep users interested.

The administrators of Art.com and AllPosters.com are also very active in responding and maintaining conversations with their users who leave feedback. It’s one thing to build a user community that feels comfortable directly interacting with and leaving messages for a brand— it’s another, even more beneficial practice to maintain quick and attentive responses to those users queries.

It is evident that the Art.com brand understands its users and their interests. It is highly successful in employing a Facebook marketing strategy to cater to these interests with consistent interactions and promotional efforts. Art.com is a great example of Facebook marketing that is simple, yet highly effective. Are there other tips you use for your own brand page that we may not have covered in this post? Share in in the comments below!

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