We have gotten lots of questions over the last week about the new Timeline format for brands, which will become mandatory by March 31. It’s definitely a big change in the way your brand page looks. If you’ve already converted over to the new timeline format on your personal page, it will be a bit easier for you.
The biggest change of course is the cover photo. Much wider than typical photos, these are essentially online billboards, so it’s important that you think carefully about what image you want to portray here. Literally.
Here are some free tools for making interesting Facebook Timeline images.
Of course, you can always contact us and we can create a custom graphic that will suit your brand beautifully and fit perfectly in the space. 😉
There are also several things to know about the new Facebook Timeline format. Beyond a great cover image, two of the most important to take care of right away are the timeline feature itself and a solid strategy for “pinning” posts.
Plan Your Timeline
The timeline itself allows the brand to feature relevant milestones from the company history, thereby giving the user more information. It makes the experience richer and deeper than in the prior era.
Here you can feature product launches (with photos/video whenever possible) and other major events. This can be a very useful tool and is the most basic change of the new format. It’s more structured, less of a free-for-all format of the prior era.
Action item: Think about what the major milestones are for your company and add that information to your page, with some great photo or video assets.
Pinning Comes to Facebook – Almost ;->
I think one of the most interesting new features is “pinning”. Pinning allows you pin a post to the very top of timeline for a specific period of time (up to 7 days), essentially enabling you to feature a piece of interesting news. This way, it remains “top of mind” literally for up to a week. An awesome tool for marketers! You can identify pinned content by the small orange flag on the upper right corner of the item, as you can see on this Today Show post.
Action item: Plan for a regular series of items to “pin” to the top of your timeline. Your latest product launch, news release, blog post, kudos from a customer, etc. Each item can be up there for up to a week, so you can highlight 4 or more items a month.
So yeah, we are total geeks here and are loving some of the new changes on the Timeline format. Would love to hear what’s working for you and what’s not? Are you ready to make the switch? Or are you holding back – and why?