With the rollout of Timeline for brands this morning, we took the opportunity to publish it on our SMC-DC page (thanks, Elliot!), and I took Facebook’s walk through tour to see how everything works. Here’s what I’ve got so far…
You can “preview” Timeline now, and then opt to either publish it, or wait. Until March 30th you can always revert to the old version. Update: Apparently that’s not true – once you officially “publish” the new format, that’s it – no going back! After March 30th all brand pages will have the new Timeline format.
1. Cover photos – Specs appear to be 851 x 315 pixels. Facebook has released guidance for brand pages re: cover photos as follows:
Cover images must be at least 399 pixels wide and may not contain:
- Price or purchase information, such as “40% off” or “Download it at our website”
- Contact information, such as web address, email, mailing address or other information intended for your Page’s About section
- References to user interface elements, such as Like or Share, or any other Facebook site features
- Calls to action, such as “Get it now” or “Tell your friends” [source: Facebook.com]
Here’s what our SMC-DC page looks like with Timeline enacted:
Click through for the live site
2. Profile pictures must now be square, and appear to be 125 x 125 pixels. Facebook’s tour suggests using one at least 180 pixels wide.
3. The navbar (photos, apps, etc.) – Photos automatically are first, but you can change the orders of the other boxes. You can only “feature” four apps, but you can have up to twelve total live on the page. When I upgraded my page, all of my apps were changed to inactive (though all settings stay intact, of course) and I had to go into the dashboard to re-add the ones I wanted, presumably in the preferred order.
4. Adjusting Timeline posts – you can go through to hide posts you don’t want to show (though I would only recommend that in extreme circumstances – we all know what happens when brands start deleting posts). More importantly, you can “star” posts to feature them, which means it will be take over both columns of Timeline to be twice as big. Example:
And hey, click through and read this awesome post from SMC while you're at it!
You can also click the pencil to “pin” posts to the top of the page and highlight them (interesting possibility to feature fans’ posts, perhaps?)
5. Private messages – People can now send your page direct messages, which appear on the top right of your new admin panel (which you can choose to show or hide from the top of your page as you wish).
6. New admin panel – lots to play with here. It has sections for Notifications, New Likes, Private Messages, and an Insights snapshot.
Clicking “Manage” up top brings a drop down menu of the options to Edit Page, Use Activity Log, See Banned Users, and Use Facebook as [Your Page]. The Activity Log looks pretty interesting – here’s a screenshot with the drop down options available:
Clicking “Build Audience” from the admin panel brings a drop down menu of Invite Email Contacts (interesting), Invite Friends, Share Page, and Create an Ad. Here’s the “Email Contacts” options:
All in all, I think there’s a lot of possibilities here. I love the direct messaging to pages – that’s been needed for a while. The cover photos look fantastic (check out any major advertiser’s page like Dove, Coke and Red Bull to see what they’re doing), and there’s bound to be some cool cover photo + profile picture integration ideas. Only featuring four apps is a bummer, and we have yet to see if brands will be able to maintain any kind of custom landing pages/fan gates. But overall Timeline is undeniably better for featuring media posts like pictures and video, and it’s also just more attractive, which is never a bad thing.
What have you discovered so far from playing around? What do you like/hate about it so far? Any brilliant ideas to capitalize on the new format yet?
