When the Facebook Timeline was introduced for profiles a few months ago, the community was in an uproar, as they usually are when a change is made to the beloved Facebook UI, which we always grow so accustomed to. However, as is always the case, once enough time has passed, people learn to embrace the change and realize that there was in-fact, a lot of thought put into the user experience, and eventually it became widely accepted that the timeline was a major improvement as it provides a lot more opportunity for customization and organization of information.
Now that the majority of the profiles have been switched over to the timeline, Facebook has rolled out Timeline for Facebook Pages, and this update is truly a game-changer.
One of the biggest changes is that Facebook Pages can now have applications and landing tabs running on a 760 pixel canvas (as opposed to the previous 540 pixel one). This also means that a lot of designers and developers will be scrambling to update their existing designs to the 760 pixel version so that it fits the canvas properly rather than just being centered with whitespace on either side (as it currently does by default).
Other than the obvious factors such as being able to add ‘Stories’ that happened on particular dates (see: Manchester United’s Facebook Page for an excellent example of this execution), the Timeline adds the ability to integrate applications directly into the Facebook Page’s timeline. This will allow for deeper engagement and more interactivity between the Page and it’s fans.
The admin features for the Pages have also gotten a lot of value added features which will give the moderators more insight on how their stories shared spread virally, how much impact each one had and allow them to better analyze their users’ viewing patterns.
The cover photos alone have added a whole new dimension to branding your business’s Facebook Page. The ability to have such a large image on the heading of your Facebook Page opens the door for a lot of creativity to spark. This space can also be useful for displaying important information such as the date and time of a primer event.
So now it becomes a mad-dash for all the major brands to quickly re-vamp their Facebook Pages to involve a slick new timeline, an awesome cover photo, cool new apps for their Pages and promote lots of interactivity on their Pages to take advantage of all the hype surrounding the timeline. Overall, Facebook will see increasing engagement levels and a much better user experience from this update and it will undoubtedly go down as one of the more significant changes in recent memory as the Timeline roll-out is now complete.
