{Guest post from Jonathan Eccles, Facebook technical lead at thismoment.com, the leading social brand management infrastructure company.}

Today’s fMC, or Facebook Marketing Conference, yielded a motherload of Facebook product announcements representing the natural evolution of concepts introduced at last year’s f8. This time, the audience was full not of coders and geeks, but rather agencies and marketers looking to grasp the continually growing tidal wave of Facebook’s engaged user base.

Great Advertising Depends on a Great Narrative
Before jumping into product announcements, top FB honchos like Chris Cox and Sheryl Sandberg spent a considerable amount of time stressing how Facebook wants to change the marketing landscape. This sea change depends on advertisers understanding that users love a good story — especially one in which they know some of the characters — and Facebook’s platform offers the perfect mechanism through which a narrative can be described and, where possible, demonstrate relevancy to the consumer by involving their friends in the same tale. At the same time, this consumer would be welcome to join and interact with the narrative, and in the process spread that story one more degree outward.

And so we arrive at the Big Problem That Needs Solving: how to show your story, and how to get people listening. Here is Facebook’s answer:

Timeline for Pages
It’s been widely assumed since f8 that Timeline — announced initially as a feature for users — would be given to brand Pages in the near future. Today, Page Timelines finally arrived and are an excellent evolution from the Wall as a place not only for brand/user conversation, but for a brand to tell a long-term story (or movie mythology, product’s history, etc) through an arresting visual medium.

Page admins can switch instantly to the new Timeline format, preview it just for themselves, or retain the standard Wall until the end of March, when the switch will be forced to all Pages owners.

For a lot of you, this means March will be a month to spend time curating your online history, picking which posts to feature, hide, or delete, and also adding milestones in your brand’s past to mark special occasions. While thismoment helps its clients to ensure a seamless transition, you should be aware of these significant Facebook changes that come with the new Timeline format.

The new format is:

1. You can now brand your Timeline with a large Cover Image, but beware that Facebook will discipline your Page if you include too much text, CTA’s, Like incentives, or advertising in general in the Cover area. This image is all about projecting your brand’s identity to your fans.

2. Tab links are now thumbnails below your cover photo. No more long list of text on the left side on the screen… instead, your Photos link and 2 to 3 tabs of your choice get 110×72 thumbnails alongside their titles, directly below your Cover image. An expander arrow to the right allows users to also navigate to any of Tabs you have installed on your page.

3. While this is great for visually pulling Timeline consumers to your tab experiences, an unfortunate consequence is that Facebook has removed the Default Landing Tab option, likely in an effort to direct more users to a controlled conversation environment that can be transformed directly into social and ad opportunities (read: more revenue for Facebook).

We can see how this may frustrate your need to control a brand experience from the first second a user reaches your Facebook presence, but with our CMS’s ability to also generate Facebook Apps, brand sites, YouTube pages, and more, we still offer those particular brands an option to build a totally controlled brand experience that can collect Page Fans where necessary, and also guide relevant demos of users to the Page Timeline when it’s preferred. As we’ve already proven with Lexus’s Points Of No Return application, you can have your cake and eat it too.

4. You’ll also be able to “pin” a specific Timeline Post to the top of your page for prominent featuring, with a time limit of 1 week per post. This offers one more workaround for the defunct Default Landing Tab feature, since you can always pin a Post that’s just a linked CTA to a specific tab.
thismoment is planning to take this method one step further by offering new tools in the near future to create a visually arresting, interactive call-to-action directly inside your pinned Post area (not to mention posts in your fans’ Newsfeeds) that will shepard your users into any thismoment’s DEC experience you’d like to promote.

5. Page Tabs now can occupy an 810px width. We’re exciting to roll out new DEC templates in the near future that capitalize on this improved real estate! In the meantime, all of your standard 520px wide tabs will continue displaying normally, elegantly centered in their larger frame space.

Real-Time Insights for Real-Time Conversation
To go along with your new and improved brand/fan conversation in your Timeline, Facebook has opened up numerous important Insights metrics to become real-time as opposed to a 48-hour delay. With this new timing, you’ll be able to track performance deltas in the same hour you post or pin new content, and consequently alter your posting and/or advertising strategies to capture this wave optimally.

thismoment’s Brand Monitor tools are the perfect conduit for this new real-time data, but there’s another piece to this puzzle: Developers at thismoment are diligently working on new tools that leverage Facebook’s Ads API to create a holistic experience that helps accelerate the all-important feedback loop of content, conversation, and listening. This ad integration will become all the more powerful with Facebook’s numerous advertising product announcements today, including…

Reach Generator – Pushing Your Content to Fans
Facebook understands the demand from brands to more prominently push their Page Posts into fans’ Newsfeeds. Their solution is an easy-to-use, single-switch mechanism called Reach Generator. This tool allows marketers to reach at least 75% of their fans’ newsfeeds over a month-long period by sponsoring one Post per day. Their beta program already has great success stories from Ben & Jerry’s (who reached 98% of their fans in a month) and Dr. Pepper (who consequently saw a 140% increase in conversation about their brand on Facebook).

Premium Ads
Reach Generator may seem pretty cool on its own, but Facebook is charging full-speed to deliver as many great new ad products as possible before their IPO… The new Premium Ads product represents a continuation of their Story-Is-The-Ad concept in a few key ways:

1. You’ll be able to specifically transform any one of your new Page Posts into an ad in the standard sponsored zone to the right of the NewsFeed Home Page. These ads can also take the form of photos, videos, links, and even a new “Offers” ad type that provides retail discount incentives to Facebook users.

2. The Home Page sponsored section will also now feature mentions of your friends who have engaged with the brand in question, plus a section for Liking or Commenting the ad content. Note that, in this case, users won’t be Liking an ad, but rather the content itself. This fits exactly with Facebook’s strategy that A) stories generate brand engagement, B) ads are not content, C) ads are how that content is deployed to users and how those users are enticed to listen.

3. The logged out screen will also now have a section for placements. Facebook found that users actively log out of their service enough times per month that their resulting standard generic interface could be prime ad real estate.

4. Most importantly, Premium Ads may also be featured in users’ Newsfeeds. Adding sponsored content into the feed is a big step for Facebook, and marketers have been clamoring for it for some time. While doing this years ago may have been a tough sell to users, the new stories-are-ads model (especially with user-based sponsored stories) should allow for Newsfeed ads to still feel like authentic engagement between users and the friends/pages with whom they are connected. Which leads us to the final twist of the day…

Mobile Ads At Last!
Mobile is an exploding market, and every web giant has made it clear that a positive market position in 5 years can’t exist without a great mobile strategy. Facebook’s mobile apps have been a bit hit with users, but ads have been conspicuously absent, much to marketers’ chagrin. With the announcement that Premium Ads would feature Newsfeed placements, Facebook also is allowing these same ads to appear on mobile Newsfeeds. As more and more of our audience reaches out through their phones and tablets instead of laptops and desktops, reaching these users through mobile ads will be a huge win.

All in all, we’re super excited about these new upgrades! We will continue to work around the clock to roll out new and interesting brand-centric features over the coming weeks and months, and thank all our partners for helping us push the envelope on driving user engagement.

About the Author

Jonathan Eccles — Born and raised in the bay area, Jonathan spent his childhood watching the tech bubble rise and burst before attending Stanford University for interdisciplinary bachelors and graduate degrees that combined music, computer science, electrical engineering, and physics. Seeing many of his friends move on to top positions at Facebook and other small (at the time) start-ups, Jonathan opted instead to pursue music for 4 years as a composer/performer and audio technology product manager, but soonafter joined his colleagues in the tech world by becoming thismoment’s Facebook Technical Lead.