The inevitable has happened. Those beautiful days when business owners were given the opportunities to present information the way they like via Facebook fan page and by making some changes in FBML are over and you are left with the bare truth that your business page needs to stripped to down to the bare minimum. Yah, Facebook is breaking down the difference between a corporate profile and a general user profile by forcing them all to adopt Timeline. So, come March 30, 2012, Facebook will withdraw its support to all third-party applications that have been doing a great job to spice up interaction between members and corporate business profile. So, a new world is taking shape and this can create much trouble for marketers. So, let’s take a look, how things are supposed to take shape in coming days:
Getting Likes Will Be Tough: Yes, sad but true. Previously, marketers used to give a try at different practices to increase the number of Likes. Sometimes, they create a Like Gate whose sole purpose was to create an artificial wall between the updates and the visitors and the updates only get visible only when visitors Like the Fan page. The secret lies in tricking the visitors into clicking them. But with Timeline, getting Likes for Pages will be a hard nut to crack since you will not have the support for third party tools like – FBML and its likes. No, all it down to one thing, yes creativity. So work hard since you have a whole new unexplored world to explore.
Flashy Things Have Gone: Facebook must have decided to go extra mile to reduce its dependence on third-party sites that are causing it huge bandwidth. By pulling the plug on third party services, Facebook has thrown off its nagging dependency. Though it has at least same time cut down the amount of liberty and flexibility that have been enjoying by the corporate profile holders for the past few years. But we must accept the fact that new Timeline is much more organized and looks stunning.
Driving Traffic Will be Tough: Yah, new timeline as it seems makes it tough for marketer to drive traffic to main website. Since there is no such option to feature a miniature version of your website right inside Facebook, There will be little chances of driving traffic directly to your website when visitors will bump on your website at the very first onset. You need to follow a middle path and try to maintain a right mix of creativity, professional and promotional elements; otherwise you are sure to see a steady decline in the number of visitors coming from Facebook.
Branding Will Take Centre Stage: Since people are going to see what your organizations are up to whenever they are visiting your timeline page, you have to be very much carefully while promoting your company in Facebook. Make sure people are there to appreciate your effort and they should not be shouting at you for doing something sneaky. This is certainly not a good advertising for your brand image. So, take you time and do not be evil while promoting your service.
Just stick to basics and you will be good. Timeline or no Timeline, this does not matter at all.
Author Bio: Stephen Dedalus is an online consultant by profession and blogger by passion. He has written numerous articles and currently associated with webhostingdeals.org that offers best Web Hosting Deals.
