A report from PageLever suggests that social marketers using custom tabs on their Facebook Pages have seen less engagement since the introduction of Timeline. Tabs helps marketers organize their social content and attract users to different elements of their Facebook marketing effort.
The new page layout has resulted in 53 percent fewer clicks to tabs since companies started transitioning to Timeline, which places a premium on the content brands share on their walls.
Decreased tab clicks should not be seen as evidence against Facebook social media marketing. PageLever believes its data signals a change in the best methods for driving engagement, clicks and other activity. Moreover, Brafton has reported that overall brand engagement has risen since Timeline rolled out. Simply Measured data suggests businesses saw 46 percent more engagement per post on average within the first month of the new Facebook layout.
Timeline has changed the way users interact with content on the site. Whether shared by their friends or brands they’ve liked, it’s clear users are looking more at the Timeline and content within it than in other elements of a Facebook Page.
Timeline became the default fan page layout in late March. Since then, custom tabs have been lost in the shuffle with so much more visual content on the page. PageLever recommends marketers move from tabs to more organic content sharing. Timeline has changed the way users interact with content on the site. Whether shared by their friends or brands they’ve liked, it’s clear users are looking more at the Timeline and content within it than in other elements of a Facebook Page.
Additionally, Facebook has developed some features for marketers aimed at making it easier for them to succeed with Timeline. The release of Sponsored Stories and Sponsored Posts gives marketers a chance to highlight their content in the users’ news feeds to direct them to their websites or their Facebook Pages.
In the past, companies used Facebook tabs for a number of reasons. However, they were mostly aimed at driving attention and engagement for specific marketing campaigns. With the changing behavior of Facebook users in terms of marketing interaction, focusing on other features could help marketers drive more traffic.
While conducting the research, PageLever also found that engagement on weekends has increased. The late March rollout of Timeline has produced of a series of spikes in engagement, all of which correlated with the weekend. However, the company said that it doesn’t believe consumers are going to business pages more frequently on the weekends, but rather they spend more time interacting with content on Timelines on these days.
Marketers have been forced to adjust heavily to new Facebook features, but the company has recently made some accommodations to make marketing easier on Facebook. Most recently, Brafton highlighted a new voice tool aimed at making it easier for marketers to shift back and forth from their personal profiles to maintaining the brand voices of the account they manage.
