Facebook Timeline for brand pages
Facebook has announced the new Timeline layout for brand pages and is planning to make them compulsory on 30th March.
You can preview your page now and once you’re happy with the layout, you can go ahead and publish it.
Many of the features on the new timeline for brand pages is similar to personal timelines. If you’d like to know more, here’s a few things you can expect to find:
Your cover photo
This is the first thing that people will see when they visit your page – as with personal timelines, the cover photo spans the width of your page so it makes a great impact. Of course, Facebook have a few rules in place about what you can and can’t display in this cover photo. Exclusions include: no prices, no contact information, no references to any Facebook feature such as a like and no calls to action of any kind.
The ‘about’ section
Photos, likes and apps are now at the top of your page in the ‘about’ section. Photos show first, but you can change the order of everything else. The ‘likes’ box will show the last five pages that you have liked as your brand – so it’s worth having a think about which ones you want these to be. You might also get a shock when you click on your page tabs and apps – these now all have a wide canvas, so chances are that beautiful tab you made a while ago is going to look rather slim now!
Personalisation
Your Facebook timeline brand page is now highly personalised for your fans. When they visit your page, they will be shown which of their friends have already liked the page and any activity which is associated with them, their friends and the brand. The fact that friends are now shown so prominently indicates that incentivising fans to target their friends may become a more regular goal of brands on Facebook.
Timeline layout
You now have quite a lot of control over the layout of your brand timeline. If you hover over a story or photo, you can click on the star icon to make it wide enough to fill the page (similar to your cover image). You can also use the pencil icon to pin static content to the top of your page or alternatively hide it or delete it.
Admin
However, what’s interesting from a social media management perspective are the new features for page admins. The Facebook Timeline comes with a new admin panel where you can see the latest comments on your timeline and view your insights all in one place.
And what’s really exciting is that the new timeline now comes with a private messaging system. Instead of writing on your wall, fans can now message your page privately. This means that the biggest challenge with the new page may well be customer service based – if your customers want to complain, they will message your page and expect a prompt reply, so you will have to have a system in place to deal with this.