Woah! A whopping great picture on my Facebook page

Facebook yesterday (Wednesday) rolled out its new Timeline feature for business pages – bringing with it some good features, and some that will be less popular.

Account holders have a month to play with the new layout. You can choose to publish your new-look Facebook page now, or wait until March 30 when it will be compulsory.

Here’s our take on the changes:

Cover photo

Just like personal accounts, business account holders can have a whopping big horizontal picture at the top of their page – this can be used for an inspirational image, or the company logo.

It’s the first thing customers will see, so page owners will need to be creative. Don’t forget Facebook forbids the use of the cover photo as a selling tool – start using your cover picture as an advertisement and incur the Wrath of Zuckerberg.

Profile picture

To compensate for the whopping big cover photo, your profile picture just got smaller. It’s square now, which may mean designing a square image for your branding.

Apps

Tabs are out, apps are in. Your tabs will be converted to apps automatically, so there is no need to reconfigure them. You can display four under your cover picture, and have 12 in total.

Landing Tabs

Looks like they’ve gone. Whether I ‘Like’ your page or not, I’ll be directed directly to your Timeline. Anyone who invested in a landing page – including one with a Like Gate (access to the wall only by clicking Like) – will be disappointed, although companies who’ve built a business selling customised pages are sheepishly pointing out that the tabs are still accessible.

Pinned Posts

If you have an important post that you want to keep at the top of your page, you can ‘pin it’ there. Every time you post something new, your pinned post will stay at the top. Clever Facebook users will already be thinking of ways to utilise this feature.

Milestones

You can now retro-fit your Facebook feed. Done something spectacular in the past that you want visitors to know about? Use the milestones feature to back-date a post and/or picture. Looks like I’ll be spending a while going back through my files and retro-fitting my Timeline.

Want to know what one of the new Facebook Pages looks like? Guess who’s done one?

www.facebook.com/SecretAgentMarketing

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