Facebook Changes the Rules Again

The Facebook Timeline is now coming to Facebook Pages.  The changes follow the release of the timeline to Personal Profiles and Facebook Groups and will be rolled out 31st March.

You can see an example of how one creative person, put the new timeline to use on their Facebook Page.

The changes are quite significant and are more likely to favour big brands than smaller businesses who have Business Pages. Overall the changes are positive - especially you are a big brand. For smaller, lesser known brands and start-ups, the one negative is that they can no longer have a default custom landing page.

This along with the other changes, mean that it will be more challenging for smaller, lesser known brands to encourage people to like the page without using some form of paid traffic.

Here is run down of the key changes and how they may impact you.

Profile Photo

• The profile picture that is currently on the left had side of the Fan Page is going and will reappear as a small image near the cover photo
  • This means that you will no longer be able to use this to advertise your web address, email address, contact details
  • Facebook also recommend that you put your logo in this section - the recommended size is 180px x 180px
  • The 5 images along the top of the profile are going

Cover Photo

• The main real estate of the page will be a cover photo, however there are specific guidelines as to what you can or can't do on this photo. You can't:
  • Include price or purchase information such as 40% off or download here
  • You can't include contact information such s a website address, email, mailing address or info that should go in your pages about section
  • You can't make reference to actions such as "like" or "share" or have an image of an arrow pointing from the cover photo to any of these features
  • You can't make any calls to action such as get it now or tell your friends
• The size of the cover photo is 851 x 315 pixels (although there is some debate about this)

What Else Has Changed?

• Navigation
• Pinning
• Starred Posts
• Ability to highlight important milestones
• Pages can now receive private messages
• Administration
• Page Insights

Navigation

The navigation area has moved from the left hand side to the right hand side of the page and now lives underneath the page cover.

Pinning

If you have an important post, you can pin it and it will appear at the top of the page. The "pinned" item stays at the top of the page for 7 days and then after 7 days it moves back to the timeline.

Starring

If you have other posts you might to highlight, you can star it. Unlike pinning, it won't appear at the top of the page but it will be given more real estate and be in  larger story format ensuring it stands out.

Milestones

You can highlight important moments by creating milestones. If you are a business, you might add Milestones like when you hired a new CEO. If you are a brand, you might create milestones like when you launch new products. Imagine if you are a business that is always innovating and had a bunch of milestones where you had new products. This has a lot of potential.

Private Messages

Whilst pages don't have the ability to message fans, fans can message Page Admins. This feature can be turned off by page admins so you will need to decide if you want the ability to receive private messages or not.

Page Insights

According to All Facebook, Pages that have upgraded to the new timeline will show more insights data than previously released. These include the:

• Most popular week
• Most popular city
• Most popular age group
• New likes per week
• Weekly number of people talking about the page.

All information will also be displayed in a much larger font. You can see what it looks like on the Starbucks Page.

Admin Panel

In addition to the changes above, there will be changes to the admin panel. Admins will now be able to access information such as:

• Analytics
• Private messaging
• Page activity from the new dashboard