Facebook’s new Timeline design changes the way brands can interact with consumers, and Facebook users with each other; what you need to know to make the most of it

Today, Facebook will announce the new Timeline Design roll-out for brands platform-wide that will take place on March 30th. You have the option to preview the design and upgrade early if you choose. What you need to know is that the current look will be replaced by the Timeline view you see on your current personal profiles.

How you need to prepare:

1.) Your current images, whether or not they are just your logo or you have a longer image, must be adjusted. Logo size is square no more than 180 x 180 pixels.

2.) The “cover photo” is a maximum 851 x 399 pixels. Please be advised, though, of the Facebookcover page guidelines. Cover images may not contain:

• Price or purchase information, such as “40% off” or “Download it at our web site”
• Contact information, such as web address, e-mail, mailing address or other information intended for your page’s “About” section
• References to user interface elements, such as “Like” or “Share,” or any other Facebook site features
• Calls to action, such as “Get it now” or “Tell your friends”

All cover images are public, which means anyone visiting your page will be able to see the image you choose. Covers must not be false, deceptive or misleading, and must not infringe on third parties’ intellectual property. You may not encourage or incentivize people to upload your cover image to their personal timelines.

3.) Apps and custom pages now move to under the profile picture. You can show a maximum number of 12 apps.

Like before, you can move the “apps” and custom tabs around to highlight ones you would like shown; photos and Likes cannot be moved. To move the custom tabs, hover your mouse over the upper corner of the app or custom tab, click the pencil and then click “swap this with” and the app or page moves to that spot.

The unfortunate part is that you cannot select a “default landing tab” as before, so if you created a fancy welcome page or another kind of custom page, you’re out of luck unless someone actually clicks on it.

4.) You can make a certain post “stick” by “pinning” it to the top of your page; “pinned” posts stay up for seven days.

5.) Your admin panel has moved to the upper right side of the page. From there you can manage most of the page functionality you had before. Selecting admins, adding apps, etc.

6.) A GREAT addition is the ability for your fans to private message the brand and the brand to be able to respond to the fan. Before, if a fan asked a question and you wanted to respond privately, you had to do so through a personal profile. Now you can respond as the brand, which will help with customer service.

7.) You can play with the design until you’re ready to publish it or until March 30, because at that point, the page will be live on the new design.

You can see some of the new cover design with brands such as Coca-Cola here.

Post first appeared on GenConnect 

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My post Is it really all about relationships?  Yes it is, was recently featured on my friend and fellow relationship marketer, Ted Rubin’s site.  Blogger Bruce Sallan made a very interesting comment on the post.  He pointed out the principles of the business relationships I outlined were the same for any kind of relationship.  He was very much correct of course and that got me to thinking about the one day dedicated to all things relationships, Valentine’s Day, and what it could teach us about social media marketing and the Return on Relationship™ philosophy, my friend Ted Rubin and I espouse.

For example, today my husband told me that he was going to be on a business trip this week and won’t be here for Valentine’s Day.  At first I was disappointed but then I got to thinking about all of those long ago boyfriends who would always complain about Valentine’s Day. They would say things like “It’s a Hallmark holiday” or “Why should I show you once a year how much I love you, when I show you all the time,” things like that.  The difference between all of those guys (who we used to call Mr. Right Nows because we knew they weren’t Mr. Right but they were fine for right now) was that Valentine’s Day was really the only day they DID show up!  So now that I have my Mr. Right, I decided that it Valentine’s Day in and of itself really wasn’t so important after all.  I thanked him for thinking about it and told him it didn’t matter because it IS just a day, he always shows up for me and our family and consistently so.

How can brands apply this type of thinking to their online and social media marketing strategies?  Simple: do you or your Brand want to be Brand Right or Brand Right Now?    Do you want to have long term relationships with your clients or short term transactional ones?

Here are some lessons from personal relationships and Valentine’s Day I believe all brands should think about when building a social media marketing strategy

1. Show up consistently — Don’t show up once a year, once a week or once a day for that matter, social media is about conversations and engagement so you need to be consistently active on your chosen networks or you will not develop the trust and loyalty factor on which long term relationships are based.
2. Roses by any other name to do not smell as sweet –- if you build a consistent following and conversation your followers and loyal brand ambassadors will forgive you more readily for when your brand makes missteps.  Take the Jet Blue response to a difficult situation; when the flight attendant blew his cool on the tarmac at JFK the company went silent for a couple of days, but then smartly posted a short blog about the incident which was shared on all of their social sites. Because Jet Blue is consistently engaged and shows up for their customers, people were more patient with them when they fell silent realizing they needed all the facts before responding.
3. Give Christmas presents in July and take December off –  I heard Brian Kurtz, direct mail guru for boardroom.com say this at a seminar last year.  In other words, give when it’s not expected.  I would rather get a rose or a special gift on a random day then on a day that is designed for it.  Give a coupon for being a loyal customer, fan, follower, when they least expect it.
4. Loyalty and trust take time and effort. Of course people and companies want loyal and attentive communities around them but are they willing to put in the time it takes to foster it? It’s easy to buy a dozen roses and get some chocolates for your loved one once a year but does that really make someone loyal?  What have your actions demonstrated the rest of the year? Have you asked them how they were and really cared about the answer? Brands who demonstrate true caring and enjoy an authentic sense of community with their clients or constituency will be the ones who have the loyal customers in the long run.

Return on Relationship is something we can apply to all aspects of our lives.  But brands in particular need to embrace and use this philosophy in their online interactions.  Please comment and let me know your thoughts around building loyalty and Return on Relationship #RonR.

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Like many, I’m new to the social network Pinterest.  It intrigued me after reading many articles about it being the fastest growing social network, so I set out to uncover the business case for using it.  Because I’m a social media marketer, and business owner, it’s important that I squeeze every bit of visibility potential out of the various networks if I’m going to spend any time there.  To learn more, I enlisted a friend and pin-wild owner of the boutique Sueb.do Susan Goldberg Zimmerman to give me the guided tour.

Susan was a great teacher, showing me all of the beautiful images she collected of places she wished to visit and the products she has in her store.  I asked her what the business use was and she said that she looks at the images as an introduction to the person as to whether or not she wants to follow them or perhaps do business with them.  That was fair, but there had to be a more compelling reason for me (or my clients) to spend our time on Pinterest.

Once I was on my own, my first thought was about how addicting it could be; creating boards and pins of various topics can be a lot of fun but can also be a major distraction.  And from many of the blog posts I am reading, speaking to friends of mine that are full blown Pinterest addicts and my own experience trolling the web for over an hour looking for images to add to one of my own boards–it turns out I’m right.

As I mentioned, my mission was to find a business case to use the network so, I had to get back on task.  While I’m a visual person to some degree, I’m nowhere near as adept at fleshing out beautiful images that tell a story like my friend Susan.

Through my research, I found that using Pinterest is a great way to create interest in, and drive traffic to, your blog posts.  Of course your posts must have images on them–an important strategy you should be employing anyway—and it’s very easy to set up a board or several boards that highlight your blog posts.  Using the ‘pin it’ bookmarklet on the Firefox browser, you simply click on the image in your blog post and ‘pin it’ to a board. There are other ways to add images, you can upload them as well from your hard drive or embed code in order to aid you in pinning things more quickly.

Once you pin the image in the post, it displays on a board.  You can set up a board with any name you like.   If someone clicks on the pin and either clicks on the image or the link in the pin, they’re taken to my blog.  The same process also works for videos.  You can ‘pin’ videos from YouTube and once the pin is clicked the video plays on the site, no need to link off to the video.  This can be a very valuable tool.

Also, as an SEO person, I wondered if links from Pinterest could also provide any site ranking benefits  on Google and other search engines.  Turns out, so did Search Engine Land, and they did a great post called “How to Use Pinterest for Local SEO.”  Apparently, Pinterest, unlike other social networks, allows “do follow” on their links; that means the links provided on Pinterest are giving ranking benefit.

Some of the pointers they gave:

1. Make sure your profile is not hidden from search engines and use keyword-rich “about” descriptive text.
2. Begin your “about me” with your business URL.  This is not a live link but it can’t hurt to have it here.
3. Be sure to list your web URL (shown under your profile with a “globe” icon) and also set the location to the city where your business is located.
4. If your business is well represented by a Google Places business page, consider using that as the landing page for your profile instead of your website.  Particularly if there are great reviews of your products and services located there.
5. If your business is local, set up boards with your city name and collect pictures about your local area.  They don’t all have to be pictures of your products.
6. Create boards with keyword-rich titles.
7. Use good keyword text when writing descriptions of your pins.
8. Make sure to pin attractive images.  Pinterest users are all about the visual.
9. Cross promote your pins on Facebook and Twitter.

Another great tip:  Set up a Pinterest contest for your business. Offer prizes to those who post pictures about your business.  I also discovered in my research that if you put the price into the item’s description, a banner comes up with the price displayed which could be useful for retail shops.  And, unlike Facebook ®, it does not appear to be against Pinterest terms of use to set up an account in a business name, like Susan, whose account is under her boutique name.

Another way to use Pinterest, is to create new relationships with potential collaborators.  The return on relationship factor is very high on this network.  Folks are pinning and repinning content at lightning speed. You can also make comments on someone’s pins; so as long as you keep in mind the “relationship” aspect of the marketing, go ahead and post comments on pins perhaps inviting a co-promotion with a link back to your site.

There are a couple of things to be aware of with Pinterest, however.  When I first signed up I noticed that I was getting a number of emails letting me know that a great deal of people were following me, which was strange because at the time I didn’t have one pin posted.  After some research, I figured out that Pinterest was committing a major no-no; they are autofollowing people based on your “interests.”  Can you imagine the magnitude of the fallout if Facebook began to “auto friend” people based on your hometown, high school, etc.?

The other thing I noticed is that there are absolutely no privacy settings. So, if you decide to create a board that has family pictures or pictures of your local town, anyone can view them and re-pin them, something privacy advocates have been railing against on Facebook and other sites.  You must take care not to post private pictures on Pinterest.

Next beware of copyright infringement. Take a look at the “Pin Etiquette” section.  It’s best to give credit to the photographer or person’s work that you are pinning.  If you use images in your blog posts, be sure to purchase them from a licensing site like IStockphoto or Getty Images.

Lastly, once spammers realize that Pinterest is a “do follow” network, look out for all of the completely irrelevant spam comments on your pins that include links to various travel, Viagra and SEO services sites (or worse).  This I predict will be a major issue in the coming months.

Overall, I think it’s a fun, innovative network that businesses can definitely benefit from using.  Keep in mind the privacy concerns and be careful when sharing.  Also, like any social network Pinterest can tempt you to fall into the rabbit hole.  Use an egg timer or a downloadable timer on your desktop to prevent you from wasting time.

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Kathryn Rose Speaking at the Mass Conference for Women Event With Vanessa Wilson

In December, I attended and spoke at the The Massachusetts Conference for Women’s Spark & Hustle Small Business Boot Camp. The event was part of the larger The Massachusetts Conference for   Women’s Spark & Hustle Small Business Boot Camp organized by Tory Johnson, CEO of Women for Hire and Spark & Hustle. Tory’s Spark & Hustle events have always been on the ‘must attend’ list for women business owners, and now she has teamed up with conferences for women groups across the country to bring her message to a larger audience.

The event was well attended; over 500 women in all and some great information was shared. My panel consisted of social media rockstars Laura Fitton, Inbound Marketing Evangelist with HubSpot.com and co-author of Twitter For Dummies, as well as Vanessa Wilson, aka, “Crafty Gemini,” who has made a very successful business out of using YouTube to teach people how to sew and create crafts. Laura stressed that social media was about “being useful” and offering information, not selling. Her three rules to remember are: Get found, convert and then analyze. Vanessa said you don’t need expensive equipment to be successful on YouTube, just a concept that offers information that people want to see and share. For my part, I discussed using personas instead of general demographics to target your audience. In social media, you speak to people, not demographics. Also, the importance of limiting your time on social media sites to the business at hand. I use the “3×15″ formula with my clients – 3 times per day, 15 minutes each.

Here are my top takeaways from the other fantastic speakers:

• Samantha Ettus - Personal branding expert and Forbes contributor, gave tips on how to tell our personal story, but leave out the gory details. Keep the highs and use the lows as achievements or stepping stones. Also, live in what she calls the ‘sunshine state.’ Stay positive and move forward. Don’t get stuck in the inevitable pitfalls of owning and running a business.
• Marley Majcher – Author and CEO of The Party Goddess!, told us not to forget ALL of our expenses when figuring out the bottom line profits. It is easy to just focus on the “cost of goods sold” and forget about the time each task takes and what that is worth, and what she calls the “Forget Me Nots” – all of the client meeting cups of coffee, lunches, parking fees, etc. that cut into our profits. She even devised an Excel spreadsheet on which she writes down every task she performs and the amount of time so she can keep track of these expenditures, much like lawyers or consultants do

Read more at GenConnect.com

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