My goodness what has happened to my Facebook profile!!

A Timeline!!

Facebook says ‘hello’ to 2012 with the advent of the new ‘Timeline’ feature, which I have to say on a personal level I love.

But the question that I know everyone using Facebook for business is dying for me to answer is: 

Will it do for business Helen?

Well, at the moment Facebook has made the Timeline a personal profile feature only, and although they have not given an exact date, they have strongly hinted at a possible future where this may used for the business pages too!   If this happens, what are the pluses and minuses of brands/companies having a timeline instead of the current Facebook page layout?

Is This A Good Thing?

Well on one level things will not have changed, Facebook still relies heavily on human interaction.  You can create the best brand page possible, but that doesn’t mean people are going to automatically ‘like’ your page.  You need to interact and encourage interaction between your customers.

To me, the Timeline feels more personal than the previous version.  People can look    through my life and see what I was up to in 2009.  Before I accepted this feature into my life, any mistakes I may have made on a social media level (insane, drunk updates, trying-to-be-arty profile pictures, and other such embarrassing memories) were hidden after a few weeks - people forgot and someone else became the subject of their ridicule. However, with this new timeline feature, people can simply click on 2009 and be taken in a speedily manner towards any social media indiscretions that I may have, in my naivety, partaken in.  It is feels a bit like that moment when your mum takes out the old family album and regales your partner with your embarrassing stories, while showing them pictures of you, butt-naked, on a fur throw!

Hmmmm - Sometimes things are better left in the realms of the forgotten past.


Tabs

Something that may annoy some businesses is the fact that the left hand navigation has disappeared and so have any tabs that you might have lovingly created.  Those businesses that tend to rely on the tabs to create interesting and brand heavy tab pages will have to find new ways to market to their customers, but how can they do that?

Cover art

One way in which this could be achieved is through my favourite feature on the timeline – the cover image! 

This is a 840 x 310 pixel image at the top most prominent part of your page.  I love it on my personal page, as it allows me the individuality that I have been craving from Facebook, and missed after swapping allegiances from MySpace.

This is a place to show people who you are through images, or to market something about you or your company.  Authors can place their book covers here, holiday companies can add a stunning photo of a destination that they want to sell that month and food businesses could reveal mouth watering treats for customers to salivate over.  Or people can reveal their love of Picasso, Bob Dylan or Banksy

Although timelines are not yet on the business pages, there might be other crafty ways to utilise this feature in the meantime.  Two ways in which we can maybe achieve this.

1: Try to cajole your employees to have your company’s logo/name, or product somewhere in their own image on their profile page.  That is a lot of eyeballs, even for small business with only a handful of people working for them. Of course the question here is, how to make your employees get on board with this idea   I will leave that one up to you, I can only do so much.

2: You could create amazing, interesting and fun looking cover art using your company name/logo/product, as brands like coca cola have:

Be inventive and exciting:

This will have to be a job for your designers and creative types.  Let them go a bit crazy, as the more appealing your cover art, the more people will want to use it.

This would be easy for holiday companies for example.  Get your designers to format images of the beautiful locations that you sell: A sunset over the Caribbean, a crisp winter view across the Swiss Alps.  Then incorporated into the image, perhaps a small company logo in the corner???



Social Apps

As I stated earlier, it is more than likely that the timeline will affect any Facebook apps you may have created for your customers, such as booking engines and entering competitions.  It is clear that Facebook will have to think about the transition to Timeline for businesses very carefully, and take into account the difference between the features that are important to businesses, as opposed to the features that people like on their personal profiles.  The way people want their friend to interact with their profile is very different from the way a business would want its customers to interact with its page.

But while Facebook is possibly/possibly not bringing out Timeline for businesses, there is a way to take advantage of Timeline being on people’s personal profiles.  If you are one of those productive companies that has a social sharing app or your whole website within Facebook, then you will like the way this new feature shares your visitors’ activity on their profile.

If a person clicks links on your page or likes your page for example, then this activity will show up in two places. 

1: There is a feed that is in the top right hand corner of a person’s profile.  It reveals what your friends are doing, and if they click or interact with your business page in any way, it will be revealed here for all their friends to see and possibly go and take a look too.

2: It also shows up in a very prominent place on your Timeline page. The activity box is at the top of your page on the right hand side, and usually does not require any scrolling to find it, meaning that anyone looking at a friend’s page will be able to clearly see if they had been interacting with your app or page.


At first glance I like the Timeline, I like the way it looks, and I love the new cover art I can change and edit.  I enjoy going to see other people’s cover art and how imaginative they have been.  I like the fun way of rocking through my timeline and remembering those crazy days in uni, or my cousin’s wedding… though perhaps I don’t enjoy the fact that other people have this ability!!! With every new thing it takes a while to get used to and, while I normally hate the changes that Facebook comes up with, this time I am going to give it a thumbs up. 

I am interested to see what they develop for the business side of things, but without them giving a definite ‘yea’ or ‘nay’ on the whether this is in the pipeline or not, we can only speculate as to whether it will be useful to businesses and whether they will change it suit businesses purposes.

I say embrace the change – you are only young once!