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Yesterday I spoke about Eat Out The Box and their excellent Twitter engagement as well as St Elmo’s and their useless attempt at using FourSquare. Well, the good news is that there is a local brand that’s doing FourSquare properly and I bet you can guess who it is.. FNB!

FNB launched a FourSquare activation campaign that gives visitors to the Nicolway branch a free USB Memory Stick when they checkin for the first time!

It’s a great idea and I have no doubt that the number of checkin’s will rocket once people hear more about this. The part that I like the most is that this isn’t just a random once off special set up, FNB actually engages incredibly frequently, look at this:

You can look at their FourSquare page by clicking here.

Hat tip Nick Jackson.

Perhaps you remember two excellent Twitter Campaigns I posted about: Mercedes’ campaign which tweeted empty parking pays and Smart Car’s clever Tweet Stream. Well, I’ve got another great Twitter campaign to share with you today.

So this isn’t brand new news as I’ve blogged about American Express’ Twitter Sync, but it’s gaining more and more traction so I thought I should probably feature it again as a point of inspiration. To refresh your memory, the idea is that American Express customers can tweet with hashtags and receive discounts on certain products from 17 different partnering companies. After tweeting, the discount is loaded onto your account immediately (There’s a once off setup to link your cards and such).

“With Twitter, we’ve really hit the trifecta. We have a great platform in Twitter,” said Ed Gilligan, vice chairman of American Express. “We know our cardmembers are engaged in Twitter. We’ve been working with them to think about how can we help them move from conversations to commerce. To turn a tweet into a transaction.”

If you do a search on Twitter for #AmexWholeFoods, you’ll see the incredible movement:

As you can imagine, the campaign is going absolutely crazy, VentureBeat picked up on it and published a lot more detail about the campaign, so if you’re interested in drilling down into the finer details, then take a read of the post by Rocky Agrawal on VentureBeat.

Have you seen an awesome Twitter campaign recently? Please pop it in the comments below!

For those of you who have been following my blog recently you’ll know that I’ve been focusing a lot on the Facebook Timeline and have featured a number of companies that are making use of it. But tonight I want to focus on some things to assist you with making your Timeline rock.

For explanation purposes, I’m going to use the Subway Facebook Page as an example:

1. Cover Photograph

The cover photograph is the 851px by 315px image as represented above and is the biggest visual facing element of the new Facebook Timeline. This cover photograph offers brands, products and services huge potential for creating something striking to catch the attention of the audience and hopefully encourage them to like the page. It’s important to do something unique, fresh and funky. Here are some examples of pages I’ve found that I feel look great:

I think at this point it’s also important to note that Facebook do have some guidelines around what is allowed and what isn’t allowed on the cover photograph:

• No promotions, coupons or advertisements
• It shouldn’t be primarily text-based or infringe on anyone else’s copyright
• No price or purchase information, such as “40% off” or “Download it at our website”
• No contact information, such as web address, email, mailing address or other information intended for your page’s About section
• No references to user interface elements, such as Like or Share, or any other Facebook site features
• No calls to action, such as “Get it now” or “Tell your friends”

Rather strict and limiting in terms of marketing, but that’s how it goes.

2. Profile Picture

This to me is the most crucial element of the Facebook Timeline because it’s the representation that gets spread high and wide throughout Facebook and thus means that you need to cater for scaling. The profile picture appears on the actual Facebook Page, interactions as well as appearance on mobile devices. This means you have three sizes to cater for and you need to make sure that the image works in all three sizes. Far too often I see people creating profile pictures that work on the Page, but don’t work when they’re a quarter of the size. One thing I’ve found is that avoiding text is probably a good idea, at least if the text isn’t just a few characters long.

A brand that I’ve seen around Facebook a lot recently is Coricraft, a company that deals with home furnishings and production. I really like their profile picture, but when it’s scaled it doesn’t work because the font’s far too small, have a look:

You see what I mean? It just loses its effect when it’s in the smaller form. It’s very difficult to get it right, even logo’s often don’t scale downwards well, but if you work at it I’m sure you’ll find a good mix.

3. Custom Tabs

The final visual element I want to chat about are the tabs that appear on every page, you have control over these tabs and it’s worth taking the time to understand them. The examples of Pages that I’ve used in this post show great usage of tabs, if you click through to the Subway Facebook Page and click on the Freshbuzz tab, you’ll be taken through to a custom templated page with further information on the latest buzz around the Subway brand. You can use these tabs to create a real “website” inside Facebook and allow for far more engagement with users.

The Photos tab cannot be changed, this is a standard feature for pages so remember to upload some incredible photographs.

Setting up your tabs is quite straight forward:

1. Move your mouse over the little down arrow with a number on the right of your tabs and click the mouse. You will see the tabs change.
2. Hover over the tab you want to change and click the little pencil icon that appears followed by clicking “Edit Tab” from the options that appear.
3. Click the Change link in the popup that appears followed by clicking on Change again on the next popup.

That’s it!

One last example belongs to Fun. The group behind We Are Young, they’ve created a tab that links to an online store:

Conclusion

By following just these 3 steps you’ll already be setting yourself apart from your competitors, in most cases at least. Remember that branding your page alone isn’t enough, social networking is about networking, you’ll need to update your page often and engage with those that are interested in your brand.

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