Facebook Timeline for Branded Pages

Yesterday Facebook announced its latest updates to branded pages. This essentially brings Fan pages inline with personal pages. Overall it is an exciting new way for brands to engage with their users. That being said though pages that regularly provide interesting content should see great benefits. Pages that ignore their Facebook fans will not get anything from the new Facebook changes no matter how amazing their new cover picture is.

Some of the keys points you need to know:

All Fan pages will be forced to switch over to the new timeline on 30 March
You can log into your page and preview what your Page would look like now by using this link
Timeline is currently not available on mobile devices but should be switched over soon

Some of the key new features/changes of Timeline include

Cover Pic – This is a large (851x315) image that sits at the top of your new page. Obviously great from a visual point of view there are however a few restrictions in the type of messaging you are allowed to place in this image.

Tabs - These have been moved to sit just under the cover pic on the right hand side. As previously, this allows you to link to your own facebook applications. There are 4 spots visible to the user with the ability to show 12 applications view in a dropdown menu. Out of the 4 spots the first one is always Photos.

Pinned Posts – You can pin key messages to the top of your timeline for 7 days which prevents important stories not getting lost through other regular updates.

Milestones – As all the content is placed on a timeline it’s obvious that you can now go back in history and set up key milestones. These milestones can be another from when the store first opened to when your fan page reached a certain number of fans.

Applications – You are not able to set an application as the default landing page any more. However there are now 2 different sizes you can design your application to. A narrow 520px and a Wide 810px version. This will allow developers a little more freedom in the way they present content through applications.

Private Messaging – The new Pages allows admins to send and receive private messages to users.

There a many more changes in regards to stories and the administration of Pages. Download the full user guide click here. Or for a step by step tutorial you can check this out

Brands that have already changed over

Nespresso