Facebook Rolls Out Timeline for Business Pages

Social Media giant Facebook launches Timeline for business pages.

Choosing leap day to start rolling out Timeline, with a full implementation date of March 30th for all business pages.

Here’s are the takeaways for business.

•  Companies can star posts to expand their appearance to widescreen or pin posts to appear in the Timeline’s top-left area for seven days.
• Companies can also add to their pages what Facebook refers to as “milestones.” These widescreen content boxes featuring photos and text can detail specific points in a brand’s history.
• The Timeline format is the same as as your current personal profile.

Cover Photo

The cover photo is the new landing experience. Facebook is giving you access to prime real estate to customize your page and improve on user experience. Before you jump into this, there a couple of things you need to consider before uploading your Cover Photo:

• The specs: 850 x 315px, which is a lot more space than you had before to customize your page.
• You can’t use it for calls-to-action, promotions, website promotion and other things like that.
• Think creatively on what you want to portray with your brand cover photo.
• Here is the full list of items you can’t include on your image.

Profile Photograph 

• Your profile photograph or “avatar” on the sidebar is gone.

No more Landing Tabs

• The biggest angst for Page owners at the moment, and their marketing team.
• The possibility to setting up a default landing destination for non-fans is gone.
• Going forward, all visitors will land on the Timeline by default.
• This means welcome landing tabs are gone.

You will have to come up with new creative ways to deliver a better user experience for first-time visitors. A welcome video pinned to the top of the timeline sounds like a good idea, and of course the good use of the cover photo.

Custom Tabs and Apps

• Tabs are more prominent now since they’ve been moved to the top just below your cover photo.
• You can organize the order of these elements so people see what’s more relevant.
• The only one you can’t move is “Photos” but other than that, you can display your apps/tabs however you want.
• There is a little button with an arrow pointing down on the right, this panel reveals the rest of your tabs, you can also arrange the order there.
• The new dimensions for your custom tabs and apps icons are 111 pixels x 74 pixels.
• You can have a max of 12 Apps running on your page.

Custom Tabs New Specs

• Understand that you can still have Custom Tabs, they just can’t be set as “Landing”.
• Old width use to be 520 pixels, is now 810 pixels, giving you 35% more photographic real estate to tell your story.
• Old tabs with the 520 pixels will be centered on the page.

Pages Historical Activity

• Like your personal Timeline, ALL historical activity will be showed –both positive and negative.
• Brands should hide historical content that might reflect poorly on your brand.
• Visitors to a brand’s page will be able to see Facebook friends’ interactions with that page, such as when a friend links to a page in Facebook post.

Admin Panel

• The new pages also feature an admin panel for page managers to view notifications and page analytics.
• Respond to messages and edit page content.
• The feature makes more insights visible to brands. Previously, visitors to a brand page could see how many people liked or were talking about the brand.
• Now brands can see more of the page’s demographic breakdown—including age ranges, the most popular week for the brands and the cities driving the most visitor traffic.

New Pin Feature

Wonder if Mark Zuckerberg borrowed this from Pinterest?

• Pin feature can be the key to improve engagement on your page.
• There is always a post on your page where you wish you had more control over, the pin feature allows you to keep it at the top left on your page.
• That post is limited to seven days.
• There will be a little ribbon added to the top right of the post.

Highlight a Post

• You can highlight a post within your timeline, by clicking on the star when you hover over the post, it will change the dimension to a full width.
• If you post your blog content on your page, this is a good way to make it stand out from other posts.
• Great way to highlight milestones in your page.
• Great way to highlight relevant information and content.

Private Communications

• Also new, users can send a message to a page privately.
• This should improve your communications.
• This feature is accessible from the admin panel.
• This feature is optional, Pages can opt-out by disabling the messaging system in your page settings.

Closing Comments

Change is inevitable, and is happening at lighting speed in today’s business climate. Be clear about your Goals & Objectives, however be Flexible about the Process. How will you implement Timeline for your Business Pages?

He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator.
– Francis Bacon 

Join me at my upcoming Facebook for Business Made Easy Seminar on March 8th where we will be going over all these new changes.

 

Tagged as: Blair Ball, Blair Evan Ball, Facebook Timeline, Prepare1, Social Media Marketing, Timeline, Timeline for Business