New Facebook Pages: Understanding the Timeline for Your Brand

On March 30,  your company's Facebook page will change forever . The timeline format   will be mandatory for all business pages. However, this format has been implemented for users for a few months now. It shocked millions of Facebook users when it launched, and now it's brands' turn to embrace Facebook's changes and adapt to their new realities. Here are the important points to be ready for change!

New application width

Applications are not spared by Facebook's changes: their width can be 810px or 520px (the current format). This choice will be made in the creation of the application, but we can say that the small format makes the application feel very lonely and isolated in the new format.

New tiles for your apps

The top of the page will limit the display to 4 thumbnails. These correspond to applications from Facebook or created by the page. The application icon will become much larger since it will appear in large format (111px by 74px). It will therefore be important to communicate more information about your applications through these tiles. Also, the limit of total visible apps will now be set to 12, other apps will no longer be visible to users.

However, it will still be possible to change the order by modifying their location thumbnail by thumbnail:

NEW FEATURES

The statistics of the pages open to all

With the implementation of the timeline for Pages, most popular age group, most popular city, number of new likes per day, and number of active fans per day will become publicly available data. We can say that the curious will get their money's worth.

Figure 1: Example of RedBull: https://www.facebook.com/redbull/likes

Communicate the story of your brands

It will be possible to add events prior to the current date on the new pages. You will be able to tell the story of your brand through the important dates of its growth.

Unable to change visitor landing page

It will no longer be possible to change the default landing page for non-fan visitors to your page. It will now be necessary to encourage people to visit a URL directly.

A new administration panel to manage differently

The Page admin panel will now be located at the top right and will open to your cover photo.

This will allow you to see new notifications, new fans, and insights at a glance . Additionally, for those who have enabled the Pages messaging option, it will now be possible to see the latest posts on that page. 

Highlight certain posts

It will be possible to highlight certain publications by pinning them to the top of the page. This way they will be visible for up to 7 days at the top of the page. Use when the page needs to make important announcements.

Another way to highlight a post is to “highlight” a post by clicking on the star. This will allow the post to take up the full available width of the timeline . 

The creation of milestones 

To relate all the important facts that have influenced your brand, it will be possible to add a milestone which will take up more space on the timeline and which will attract the attention of your subscribers.    

Bonus: Ability to change page name more easily

This option seems to have been added recently at the following address: https://www.facebook.com/help/contact_us.php?id=262629790471076 . It's not clear yet if the method is effective or not, but I believe it will appeal to many people. 

2 ^nd  Bonus: Possibility to communicate directly with brands

It is now possible for users to communicate directly with Facebook pages. By clicking on the “Message” link on a page, the user sends a private message to the brand's administrators in the same way as a private message. Gone are the days of asking to send an email!

Here is the resulting message for the page:

And for the user:

Thomas