I am sure most of you would already know that Facebook has introduced a number of new features for brands which could potentially redefine the way they have been ‘traditionally’ advertising/reaching out/featuring their brand presence on Facebook.
(wow.. what everyone was doing till last week is now traditional!)
For starters, since just 2 days (29th Feb 2012), brands are now allowed to have a ‘timeline’ kind of presence and hence they can re-layout their page using a cover picture. Click here to read about the 6 major changes that marketers should know about changes in facebook.
Reading this I thought, there could never be a better time to identify which brands are really ‘tech savvy’ or lightning fast when it comes to rolling out a change for their consumers, than now.
So I spent some time today morning to manually search for most popular brands across categories and realized that only a handful of them have put in their cover picture on facebook (something that could be representative of how fast a brand reacts to change ‘digitally’)
Following is a compilation of various brands that have proven to be very nimble on their foot by upgrading their pages to the timeline interface, representative of which is their cover picture.
And ofcourse, the brand facebook would also have it’s own timeline, and this is their cover picture.
What also struck me was the nimbleness of the Indian beer brand ‘Kingfisher’ (despite its promoters being stuck in …let’s just say an unenviable position). But way to go Kingfisher!
Note that for every brand you see, I have also searched for most of their competitors across categories, and it is a telling sign when their competitors are not in the list (for eg,. Nike updated its facebook page, but Adidas didn’t yet. Coke did. Pepsi didn’t yet. Jaguar did, BMW and Audi didn’t yet…). And to further validate, I pulled out a numbere of top 10 lists of brands on Facebook, and most of the above brands figure in them. No wonder they are so popular with their fan base.
This exercise was exciting as it was incredibly easy to see right in front of your eyes, evidence of how really fast brands can be and should be digitally. When you are on FB during the weekend, try doing this. You could soon lose track of time.
Note that this list is as of 2nd March 2012 1:45 PM (Sing time). I know that as we speak more brands would be jumping onto the new facebook bandwagon, and even the above brands could update their cover picture regularly.
Is your brand/ or you already on the ‘timeline’ bandwagon?
PS: Bonus read on ‘Brands as people: on facebook’, here
Riffs on technology, marketing & culture 
Thankks for writing this