Hot New Opportunities for Social Media Marketing Using Facebook’s Timeline

If Facebook was a country, it would be the third largest in the world with over 500 million people...most of them devoted users, spending many hours a week on that one site.  I hope you have already joined the Facebook nation—it “rules” as far as facebook social media marketing is concerned. Their latest innovation, called Timeline, is a great way to showcase your company’s history, expertise, achievements and products. If you opt into it (and I recommend that you do for reasons that will shortly become clear!) it will replace your current profile and wall.

Why bother with Timeline?  Because it can make you that much more Findable online, of course.

If you’ve been faithfully posting on your company’s Facebook page, you know that newer posts knock the old ones off the page. So, there go the photos from your latest product launch, the info about those upcoming seminars, the television interview of your CEO, as well as all that great praise from happy and engaged customers. This creates problems for your facebook social media marketing plan.

With Timeline, you can showcase all your company’s achievements, news, new products, press—whatever is going on that you want your fans to know about—in a visual, scrolling, linear timeline. Tell the story of your company and its achievements in photos, videos, and text. Show off those fabulous new product you’ve spent so much time developing in living color.

And don’t forget—more information and more photos mean more opportunities for search engines to find you. Facebook itself functions as a search engine, so remember to judiciously insert your most important keyword phrases in any text, photo or video descriptions, etc. Timeline needs to be part of your facebook social media marketing plan.

Add Timeline to your Facebook page.

If you haven’t started off with Facebook for your business yet, Chapter 7 of Thumbonomics, the Essential Business Roadmap for Social Media and Mobile Marketing will show you everything you need to do, step by step.

For some real-life info about how other marketers and business people are using Facebook, check out my interview with Keegan Gerhard, owner of Denver’s trendy D-Bar Desserts Restaurant and host of the Food Network Challenge. Let us know how you’ve been using Facebook to market your business as well.

As of now, you cannot turn your business page into the Timeline format, but Facebook will eventually integrate this feature. For now, it would be wise to implement this into your personal profiles so you are familiar with how it works before it launches for business pages. Timeline will be an integral part of facebook social media marketing.