Using The Facebook Timeline To Share Your Brand’s Backstory

by Josiah Mackenzie

Storytelling has always worked well in social media, and Facebook’s new “social by design” emphasis means their business pages now look a lot less like a little separate company websites and more like a real-time stream of status updates from that organization.
Jamie Tedford had a great article on Forbes about how this design change gives us as marketers new tools for storytelling. The way Facebook is putting the spotlight on narrative, history, and photography presents an opportunity to connect with your community better than ever before.

Jamie makes the point that few of us know the origins of the products we use and companies we love. Did you know American Express started as a courier service in the late 1800’s? Or that Coca-Cola was invented as a remedy for headaches?
The Sierra Club – a grassroots environmental organization – is using the new timeline feature in a creative way to share their historical roots. They’ve gone back in their timeline….and posted about its biggest moments, dating from its founding in 1892.

This is really cool, because so many social sites are all about what’s happening right now….but this little-used feature of the Timeline update can turn a Page into a historical archive – and a great way to tell your company story.
Chris Thomas, the Sierra Club’s director of digital strategies, said, “We go back 120 years – and there’s a lot of media that exists over that period. It was sort of an immediate light bulb where we thought, this is something we can really take advantage of.”

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These are other nice historical timelines: Ben & Jerry, Starbucks