Good news everyone: Facebook timeline is finally available for pages! Announced on February 29, this new look is slowly being rolled out so if you haven’t gotten a notification yet on your page, it should appear shortly. Whether you were dreading or awaiting impatiently for the change, it’s there and will be applied to all pages on March 30. That leaves about a month for page owners to get ready. At Veodesign, we went ahead already and published our new timeline for the public to see. So, what’s new with Timeline for Pages?
New features
Timeline for Pages is based on the Timeline profile most of us have had time to get accustomed to. Everything we love about Timeline is now available for companies too; large cover images which are great for advertising, the possibility of browsing a company’s history by year and Milestones (Life Event’s equivalent for pages), friend activity and activity log. New to Timeline for Pages are the Pinned Posts which can remain at the top of your feed for a period of seven days. There’s also the Admin panel which lets you manage notifications, messages, new likes, insights and page tips.
For marketers the biggest change will be the new tabs (custom applications) that, unlike the old ones, cannot be used as a landing page anymore. While I personally think of it as a good riddance, some companies counted on that feature to capture hundreds and sometimes even thousands of consumers who were not allowed to see the content of the app without liking the page first. Tabs will now appear next to your company description and offer a comfortable width of 810 pixels (previously 520 pixels).
Is it better?
As TechCrunch editor Josh Constine puts it in his article about Timeline: “Facebook’s goal was likely to make Pages more about storytelling than product selling. And it worked.” Facebook really makes it clear with Timeline for Pages that it isn’t acting as a flee-market for aggressive marketers anymore. Just for that, Timeline is wonderful. As a user, I disliked very much those shameless marketing tactics and I’m very pleased they are gone.
The redesign as a whole looks very nice and the Admin Panel is easy enough to understand. It will take some time for some business owners to get used to this new design, especially if they haven’t yet experienced the regular Timeline, but it’s worth it; everything seems cleaner and more professional on Timeline.
I would call Timeline for Pages a success. What do you think?