timeline – President of Outskirts Press

Facebook Timeline Apps Navigation

For the last several posts I have been discussing tricks to get the most out of the timeline layout on Facebook. This has involved designing an effect cover graphic and writing an effective “About Box.” To the right of the “About Box” are four app boxes (which only show up if you actually have apps installed.) If you don’t have any apps, you might only have two boxes appearing to the left of your About box, one for Photos and one for your number of “Likes.” When/if you install new Apps to your Facebook page, those Apps will appear in this space. You can install up to 12 Apps. You can organize the order in which APPS appear on your page by hovering your mouse over them, clicking on the resulting “pencil icon” and then rearranging their order by selecting a choice from among the “Swap positions with…” list in the pop-up menu that appears.

Photos always remains directly to the right of the About box, and you cannot adjust its position. But you CAN adjust the Position of the “Likes” box but uploading more helpful apps. There are literally thousands of choices (50,000+ actually) , and the closest thing Facebook offers to a directory of its available apps is this “Apps & Games Dashboard” which is available by clicking here.

Install at least three Apps, so you have four navigation boxes to the right of your “About Box.” Then, edit the thumbnail image so that each App features an eye-catching, attention-grabbing graphic that will encourage your visitors to actually click on it. By combining all these tactics together, you and/or your company will have a Timeline-optimized Facebook presence, just like Outskirts Press. Have fun!

branding, facebook

Getting the most out of your ABOUT BOX on Facebook Pages

With the Timeline theme on Facebook pages, the “About” box is more important than ever. Yes, the “cover graphic” allows you to brand your page, but according to Facebook parameters, your cover graphic is not allowed to contain a URL. Fortunately, the About Box allows them, so be sure to take advantage of that. And, the good news is, FB automatically turns any URL that you include there into an active link that actually goes to your company website. It’s a valuable piece of real estate that you don’t want to waste, so word your “About” box in such a way to leave room for your URL to appear (rather than being truncated). This means your About text needs to be approximately 20 words long, since you have a maximum of 3 lines to include both your About text and your URL. In the case of Outskirts Press, our About language is the following, which fits exactly into the allocated space in the About box:

Outskirts Press offers full-service, high-quality, custom book publishing and marketing services. Keep 100% of your rights & royalties at www.OutskirtsPress.com.

What we offer, our benefits, and our URL. Short, sweet, effective.

To the right of the About box are the 4 app navigational boxes. I call them navigational boxes because if you manage them effectively, you can treat them like website navigation, taking your Facebook users to other pages of your Facebook presence, where each page can then be customized to accomplish tasks the main timeline page can’t do very well (ie, sell or market your stuff). We’ll discuss that next time…

facebook

Creating a cover graphic for Facebook Timeline

The “Survivor Graphic” I discussed last week was a stop-gap, a temporary solution to get something, anything, into the “Cover” spot when Facebook launched the Timeline lay-outs. But it wasn’t optimal. For one, it failed to say what Outskirts Press does – what its benefits are to its users/clients/authors. And it didn’t compensate for the loss of “Welcome pages.”

Welcome pages, as many FB marketers know, were specific app-pages that could be created to incentivize likes, by promoting upcoming perks, drawings, promotions, etc. I discussed how to create a Welcome page in a previous series of posts toward the beginning of this year when Outskirts Press was putting its own Welcome Page into use. One of the nice things about the old Welcome pages was that by manipulating a setting in Facebook, you could direct new users to your Welcome Page rather than your wall, theoretically increasing the odds of them “linking” you. Actually, this practice wasn’t theoretical at all — it was statistically proven to be successful.

The new Timeline theme removes the ability to set any other page as the landing page. Everyone comes to the same page when they visit Outskirts Press on Facebook, and we can’t send them anywhere else, not even to an alternate app-page.

So, then, with the Cover Graphic, the question becomes, “How can I use the Cover Graphic to: 1) Identify my company’s core benefits and 2) incentive “Likes” in a similar manner to my previous ‘Welcome page’ while 3) aesthetically designing around the FB elements that are super-imposed over my cover graphic?”

That’s a tall order, but with some creativity and a talented designer, you can pull it off, and I’ll share how we did it for Outskirts Press tomorrow….