Here’s what you need to know about Timeline and your tabs: Your tabs on Static HTML will remain unaffected by the changes, and the new timeline dimensions are now available on all versions of this app.
Landing Tabs
Landing tabs are still alive and well, you can still direct people to tabs created with Static HTML via links that you control, such as Facebook ads (there’s an option for destination tab). But unless the user follows a direct link to your tab, they will land on your Timeline.
Landing Tab Substitutes
Put your landing tab as the first tab after the photos (scroll over the tab icon in your admin panel, and select the second most tabs after Photos to “Swap position with”. (Photos is Facebook’s default first tab, currently you can’t change it). – Pin your call to action and include a link to your actual landing tab. To pin a status, (1) post your status, then (2) scroll over the status and in the upper right click “Pin to Top.”
Dimensions
All Static HTML tabs can now be 810 pixels wide when used on a Timeline page. To adapt a 520 pixel tab, all you need to is convert your page to timeline, then go to your tab and re-save it.
Like gating
Like gating still exists within tabs, but currently Facebook doesn’t refresh the tab after someone likes it. It is unclear whether this is a bug or a new policy — we’re keeping an eye on it. If it isn’t a bug, we will build a workaround that will be available by default within Static HTML.
Custom Icon
On Timeline pages you can now also select a bigger custom icon for tabs (111×74 pixels) through Facebook itself. To do this, go to your page > Edit Info > Apps > Edit Settings > Change Icon (here you’ll upload an image) – We’re researching ways to change the icon directly in the app, to provide simpler organization of all pages you admin.
How to adjust new timeline for your business and benefit from it?
It’s a fact that from every 7 minutes spent online 4 minutes are spent on social sites from which 3 minutes are spent on Facebook. Based on these figures it’s abundant to state why having a good Fan page is relevant for any company. As a marketer, by now you’ve probably been spending hours and hours learning FBML and creating a perfect welcome page to make your Fan page worthwhile for your visitors. And just when you were starting to get the hang of it, Facebook is changing is changing the entire concept of company pages.
During the F8 Developers conference in San Francisco in September 2011 CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced the features of the new Facebook Timeline.
The new timeline is a completely different approach of how Facebook works for companies. So can this new timeline offer any benefits to your company or is it just the same thing all over again?
First of all, the new timeline allows much more creativity for your company page in terms of design possibilities. For example photos and applications are displayed with bigger sizes and in a higher resolution. Secondly, the navigation system has been changed. The year’s timeline allows you to see the entire history of company activities, since it has launched a Facebook page till nowadays. So, from now on a visitor will be able to easily access any past activity or post of a company on Facebook by only a few clicks. Facebook says it’s about telling the whole story of your company/product or service in a single page. In this case Facebook has done all the work for you, showing your customers how much you’ve invested in your Facebook page already and providing an archive of accessible content to your fans. Keep in mind that if there’s any old forgotten content which you don’t want your customers to see anymore, it’s time to locate and remove it.
The new timeline is available to both private profiles as company pages with only slightly different features.
Therefore, it’s good to be prepared and be aware of exactly what to expect from the new Facebook timeline. Let’s have a look at the new features and more importantly how those features can be applied best for your business.
1. No default page
Before timeline you could have new visitors of your Facebook page land on your customized Welcome page. According to the new Facebook timeline any visitor – fan or non-fan – lands on a single page of the timeline. Therefore it’s crucial to create an interesting and attractive design of your main banner to encourage visitors to become a fan right away and scroll down to see recent posts and activities of your company.
2. The timeline arrangement
This is the life of your company per year. There is a link on the right side which provides visitors opportunity to access any posts of your company from the year a page was started up to nowadays. You can easily highlight the most important events in the timeline of your company by selecting the star on the top on the post. These events will be adjusted to the whole width of the Facebook screen.
The new Facebook timeline enables you to tell stories about your company/product or service by sharing and highlighting your most valuable events, photos, videos or posts. Users can filter based on four different activities from the timeline wall: highlights, friends’ activity, post by page and post by others. On the right side of the timeline they can see which of their friends already like your page, what other visitors are posting/talking, total likes of your page and recommendations for the page on Facebook. On the left side of the timeline you can see your page’s activities with multimedia, links, photos, etc.
The detailed visualization of new timeline arrangement is shown in this image.
3. Main banner together with profile picture
As mentioned before a good banner is the key element of your page. From now on, the banner is your welcome page. Make sure the feelings and emotions you want to communicate to your fans on social media are visible. In some cases it’s a good idea to create a collage of different images which represent your company/product/service the best. See an example of the Nike+ Facebook banner (http://www.facebook.com/#!/nike). For the consultancy/services industry it can be a good idea to place the image of your team to the banner. Don’t forget to place your logo and maybe some pay off or short phrase which can trigger a visitor to like the page.
Please be aware that it’s not allowed to put any promotions or call-to-actions on the banner so the commercial element cannot be implemented that obviously. However it can be created on other customized Facebook applications.
4. About company & customized Facebook applications
After the main banner comes a short overview: the ‘about the company’- section. In case you want to generate more traffic to your website or other sites it’s wise to insert links to these pages in this section. If you have a physical shop for instance you could mention working hours, address, telephone any other practical info. Additionally when people click on the ‘About company’ section they will be forwarded to the detailed information page where you can place all the additional information about your company/product or service, including geolocation with Bing maps.
Next the ‘About a company’ section allows you to show links to four customized subpages. These four main links are going to be an important part of your Facebook strategy. The photo application always remains on the 1st place of the line, however the other three pages are free to customize. Your Twitter account, videos, apps, reviews of your products or anything interesting what you want to tell to your fans can be displayed there. The customized pages will be opened inside Facebook on the page. Usually you can develop pages yourself by using HTLM code or just use the free Iframe application which is always available from the Facebook search. Another great advantage is that the maximum page width is increased to 850 px.
5. New admin panel
If you are an admin and want to know how your page performs and what’s new you can easily observe all notifications, new fans, messages and page tips from the new administration dashboard all-in-one. Moreover the dashboard allows you to measure the reach of your page by analyzing the insights. Also you can attract an audience by creating an advertising campaign.
6. Future trends and recommendations
So can the new timeline offer any benefits to your companies Facebook strategy? The Facebook timeline has the potential to be a huge treasure to organizations’ online presences. Before there wasn’t much motivation for fans to click around on a company’s Facebook page, aside from special offers or maybe a popular viral ad. Now, thanks to the new timeline, brands have a chance to provide a special surfing experience as never before. How much Facebook is facilitating the appearance of your page though, the content is still up to you.
An attractive Facebook page alone doesn’t bring you the ROI. The future trend for Facebook will be an integration of f-commerce/e-store into your Facebook page. Some companies have already started to integrate webshops and e-commerce elements into Facebook. A good example of a webshop implemented in the new Facebook timeline was made by this company selling cool t-shirts: Threadless www.facebook.com/#!/threadless
I will tell more on how to establish e-commerce on Facebook in my future blog posts.
For now it’s time to make your Fan page ready for the new timeline. From the 30th of March 2012 the new timeline page will be automatically generated from your old company fan pages. Good luck.
What’s new in Facebook? You can simply post all sorts of content, photograph or video, but the actual layout and design of your fan pages is the same as everyone using. But you can customize your Facebook Fan Page with new professional look and feel to promote your business on Facebook.
Why Facebook Fan Page?
Facebook is the most popular branding platform with over 750 million users on social media platform. Facebook changed the face of online marketing media where people can connect with friends & followers. Facebook gets hug success due to his most popular services, are they Facebook Game, Facebook Application and Facebook Site. (Fan Page)
Facebook fan page become the second generation home page for online branding and marketing to improve your business ROI, where you can easily customize your brand or services over Facebook and start broadcasting on social media channel.
Facebook Fan Page is very useful to promote business, services, new products, deals, and gift coupon or company welcome page with attractive branded flash animation, Photo & Video Galleries. Custom Facebook Fan Page is the easiest way to promote your business or services outside of your website to increase your potential customer and brand promotion.
Customize Facebook Fan Page gets advantages to increase more participants on your survey, polls and opinion or Quiz with attractive fan page design. You can integrate real time or third party application on your fan page to make it more interactive with friend and followers.
To increase product sell your can custom Facebook Fan Page e-Commerce Store, from where friends or followers can easily look at your product and buy.
Why Facebook Fan Page?
You can customize Facebook Fan Page Designing with Creative Graphics & Flash
HTML/CSS with JQuery Slider or Menu also integrate
CMS base Facebook Fan Page
eCommerce base Facebook Fan Page
Flash Animation Support (Banner or Image)
Embedded Photos & Videos with respective Galleries
Application or Survey or Quiz or Poll Integration*
Third Party API or Application Integration*
AddThis – Bookmarking & Sharing
Contact Us or Inquiry Form Integration with Backend Dashboard*
Analytic – Tracking Code Implementation
Customize your FB Fan Page URL – (www.Facebook.com/YourCompanyName)
Integration of other Social Media Platforms like Twitter, IN, YouTube, Flickr
Integration of Paid & Free FB Applications like: Coupons, RSS Feed, Twitter, Promotion Gallery, Poll & Survey, Badges, Gifts, Social Quiz, Store Location, Music Player, Leader board, Rating & Reviews
Integration of Google Translator & Analytic
Integration of Account with Twitter to check the Twitter status
Integration of Slide Share Account with Facebook so that Client/Visitor can view presentations
Google Map integration in Facebook Fan Page
Integration of Facebook Ecommerce Application (Payment E-Commerce Storefront)
Reporting is the heart of most business applications. And SQL Server Reporting Service (SSRS) is a preferred choice while MSSQL Server is the database back-end. Apart from ready to use services, SSRS provides different and useful scalability and extensibility options.
On the other end, lately, MS Silverlight has generated positive heat amongst varied business applications.
So you got the point. I’m talking about the marriage between SSRS and Sliverlight.
It started with challenges as the whole concept was an unknown devil which we were able to tame in the end.
The problem was simple – Microsoft doesn’t have any SSRS report-viewers for Silverlight – but its impact was not so. Initially, it was apparent that we cannot use SSRS with Silverlight.
So, I Googled (and then Bingged also – both the technologies are from Microsoft ) to find out the following two possibilities out of my one hour of investment:
Use Third Party Report Viewer Controls
Use ASP.NET application and invoke it from Silverlight application
Each option has its own distinctions. Here are those:
Third Party controls: We can use third party report viewers which support SSRS reports. Right now there is only one such software provider Perpetuum Software is available. They provide SSRS report viewer for Silverlight which is also Silverlight 4 ready. There are other report viewers provided by other major component providers like Telerik however they do not support SSRS reports at present. Instead, they support their own reporting ways from within Silverlight application.
ASP.NET Application: In this approach, we have to create an ASP.NET web application for hosting SSRS reports. The web application will use default report viewer control. To integrate this web application into the Silverlight application there are two possible options as below:
Using Html Viewer: We can use HtmlViewer control to view reports hosted as an ASP.NET web application. Though, Silverlight 3 does not have in-built html viewer control, there are third party controls available like one from Telerik. The good news is that Silverlight 4 does have in-built html viewer control.
Using JavaScript: We can use client side JavaScript functions to open new window or IFRAME from within Silverlight application which will show reports hosted as an ASP.NET web application.
I am sure Microsoft will come up with a better solution to this problem in the coming days. Until that any of the above options can be used. I used option #2 – ASP.NET application – considering the client needs of flexibility and it worked well.
) to find out the following two possibilities out of my one hour of investment: