Facebook Timeline For Profiles and Pages – Get Ready!

Facebook is getting ready to complete the rollout of Timeline to all business Pages on March 30th. So no matter what, your page will have Timeline on March 30th, whether you like it or not!! As with all things Facebook, there’s good and bad to these changes. My personal biggest peeves are that the huge image space at the top, while pretty,  clearly favors creative types and puts us regular, creatively-inept types at a disadvantage. Secondly, I also find the layout hard to read. The traditional stream reads easily from top to bottom in a straight line. The Timeline stream jumps back and forth from left to right, which is pretty unnatural to the eye.

From a business point of view, since switching my personal profile Timeline, I’m noticing that when I, as an individual, “like” a Facebook Page, it seems to get very little exposure on my Timeline which is a bit unfortunate.

In any case, instead of re-hashing the wisdom that already exists, here are a couple of great resources you should read and bookmark that will help you understand the changes that are coming, as well help you make the most of your new Timeline Page.

HyperArts is one of the best resources for all things Facebook and they have a great “Frequently Asked Questions” post that gives you all the juicy details on the changes.

KissMetrics has an extensive guide to the new changes.

To get your creative juices flowing about how you might use your new Timeline page, here’s some examples of brands/businesses currently using Timeline:
Florence and the Machine
Starbucks – not a fan of their coffee but their clever choice of image manages to give them an ‘artisan’ feel – clever, if misleading…
Toyota – another great cover photo

How do you feel about Timeline? Will this help or hinder your business? Let me know in the comments below.