Timeline for Facebook Pages - What You Need to Know

As of yesterday, Facebook finally introduced Timeline for Pages, giving everyone until 30th March to make a graceful transition.
If you've switched your personal profile to Timeline you probably guessed this was inevitable.
So what are we looking at exactly? What's out and what's coming into play? Here's the lowdown on Timeline for Facebook Pages.

1. Bye Bye Landing Page: In my opinion, a huge blow is that landing pages have essentially lost their meaning as non-fans now see the Timeline directly. A landing page was a fabulous way for companies to display their creativity and ingenuity (who didn't love Red Bull's *hint hint* call to action?) The page tabs still appear in the row of apps (in default icons, remember to change them) listed below the cover photo, but the landing page is no longer the default.. well, landing page.
   
   

   

   Red Bull's awesome now defunct
   Facebook landing page

   
   
2. Cover Photo: A tremendous consolation for the loss of the landing page is the cover photo. Like the profile picture and image strip could be optimized, Facebook has very kindly saved page owners the trouble of designing multiple images in tune with their brand by having a single, gigantic, in-your-face image, with a width of 810 pixels. Use this real estate to convey what your brand all about. Click here to read about certain rules as to how the cover photo should be used.
   
   
   

   

                            LV effectively communicates the essence of its brand                    
   

3. Highlight baybeh: The Highlight feature is pure genius. By clicking the 'star' icon in the corner of your post you ensure it's eye catching and unmissable, with Facebook automatically doubling the width of the post.
   
   
4. Pinning: In tune with Highlight is the 'Pin' feature, with which you can ensure an important post gets maximum visibility and stays right on top of the page. Only one post can be pinned at a time.  It's a great option to lay stress on promotions, sales, announcements, what have you.
   
   
5. Timeline itself: The essence of Timeline is to literally put out the timeline of your company, to list the historic events in its lifetime from inception to present-day. Best to get started on this.
   Check out Manchester United's history, with photos dating all the way back to 1878.
   
   
6. Private message: Admins need to be more vigilant than ever as fans can now send a private message to the page. Messages appear in the Admin panel along with other elements available to admins, such as Insights, Notifications and New Likes, all in one spot. The layout for admins is a lot more organized and easy to get around.
   
   
7. Longer About: The About section has shifted directly under the profile picture, allowing more text to be visible as opposed to the limited 250 visible characters the old design had.
   

A couple of other great pages with Timeline:

Burberry - having put into play all the above mentioned.
Herbal Essences
Coldplay

There's really nothing you can do if you dislike Timeline as so many Facebook users still do. In a field as dynamic as social media where change occurs so fast, it's best to be proactive and make the transition yourself (when given the choice anyway) rather than have it forced down your throat. With 840 million users, Facebook is obviously staying put and if you want your page to do the same, you should embrace the change as enthusiastically as a ravenous predator does its meal.

Good luck!

To learn more about Timeline for Facebook Pages, click here.

always on facebook.

A brilliant ad from Oglivy India for Vodafone Essar, depicting the website we all love to hate.

                                           

The ad cleverly enacts the past fad on our favourite social networking site - Farmville, Superpoke and Mafia Wars, not forgetting the tendency of people uploading their baby pictures, or of parents sending friend requests (my advice: keep them pending).

Are you one of those people that have an obsessive compulsion to check your notifications (or your farm) first thing in the morning? Always on Facebook, day and night?

There should be a rehabilitation center for Facebook addicts. In retrospect, it's a pretty serious disease. My sister had a friend in school that would check his Facbook on Macbooks when he was visiting the Apple store o_O It's become the norm to enter a store (for me, Ikea, Raymond's) or hotel (all the way up in the Czech Republic) and catch the person behind the desk on the dreaded site if employers didn't have the hindsight to block it.

Before privacy settings changed the first time around, user profiles were open to everyone, bringing out the stalker in us all. Don't deny it. You know you checked out pictures of people you had no idea existed, atleast once!

I must admit, I was an addict too. I still am, although the drug has changed.

On Twitter, I am a recluse. I enjoy my anonymity immensely. It's a relief not having every single person you ever met on earth on it since you were a toddler, instead to follow people you wish you could meet (Shashi Tharoor for one. Michael Owen for another. I don't follow League football but the bloke sure can tweet!). No bombardments of ridiculous games like 'It Girl' (??) and Pillow Fight!

Do you remember what Facebook first looked like? It had all your apps on your profile page.
Following the recent changes on Facebook, quite a few of us have been very vocal about our dislike of the drastically altered News Feed. I'm definitely not a fan of the Ticker, but it's a boon for business pages: fans interact on a page and their friends are updated of the activity on that page immediately, playing on the friends levels of boredom, piquing'their curiosity to pull them in too.

A survey held by Mashable a week after the F8 conference recorded people that were unhappy with the changes at a whopping 74%.

Users say Facebook me no likey

Not that Facebook cares.

But no matter how much we gripe about it, on Facebook we stay. After all, like the guy in the ad says, where else would we be? Soon, we'll have embraced the Ticker and wonder why Zuckerberg didn't come up with it earlier.
Though honestly I find that hard to believe. I pay no heed to it now - my mind has put a permanent strip of tape on that part of the screen, like Youtube sensation Julian Smith suggests here:

If he reshot and updated this video, I bet he'd feature another 25 things.

What do you think?

(Recovered from within the spiraling depths of my drafts)