By bbr

by Kelly Lucas, Marketing & Social Media Manager

In late 2011, Facebook began rolling out the new look for accounts, the Facebook Timeline. Like all of Facebook’s changes, it’s not had the best reception, though on a personal level, I love it. I find it to be very easy to navigate back to find pictures or events on both my own and my friends’ accounts. In what I imagine is a lesson taken from past format updates and their ensuing backlash, Facebook has allowed personal accounts to initially opt into the Timeline format, giving people time to play around and get a feel for it before making it the default.

Facebook has announced that business pages will also be moving to the Timeline format this month. Page admins have the ability to play around in the new format through the end of March, when the change is pushed through to all pages, ready or not.  So what does this mean for your page?

In a recent Mashable article on Facebook Timeline for business pages, author Victoria Ransom listed the six biggest effects:

Updated Look and Feel: The new look includes a large cover photo at the top of the page (use this to highlight a new service or awards received). Instead of a single feed of info, there are now two columns of milestones (use this to highlight achievements in your firm).

Reduced Tab Visibility: The tab links on the left side of the page are gone. These links have now been moved to panels under the cover photo, with some being hidden if there are more than three available panels. Users will have to actively search for links in a dropdown menu by the panels (see image from Mashable at bottom of this post), so choose your three primary tabs carefully.

No Default Landing Page: Business pages have been creating customized tabs as their default landing pages for some time now. This option is gone, as the Timeline is the new default.  You can still use custom tabs, but they will be relegated to the panels under the cover photo (see previous bullet).

New Way to Feature Content: You can now “pin” special posts (one at a time) to the top of the Timeline to highlight those you want noticed.  The pin will remain at the top of the timeline until replaced with a new pin or seven days, whichever comes first.

Current Tab Content and Applications Become Outdated: Tab configurations now grow from 520-pixel width to 810-pixel width and will need new application icons.

Private Messages Between Brands and Users: Brands and users can now message each other privately without having a public back and forth on the business page’s wall.

As with previous updates, this will most likely cause consternation among a few page admins and visitors alike. For some reason we humans do not care much for change. And this leads me to what could be one of the best April Fool’s pranks to date: On April 1^st, the official day Timeline is slated to become the default for business pages, Facebook should revert back to its look from about four updates ago. I envision the entire world shaking on its axis, threatening to tilt and roll into the sun from the explosion of hysterical screaming and hair pulling that would ensue. Just throwing that out there to you Facebook, do with it what you will….

What are your thoughts on Timeline for business pages? Does it make any difference to you?

Tabs that were formerly listed in the left-hand column like Photos and Likes are now placed as panels under the cover photo. (Source: Mashable)