Facebook Timeline for brand pages

Facebook have now announced that it will be rolling out ‘Facebook Timeline’ for all users.

Loyal fans will see then change on the 29^th of February but luckily for the social networking obsessed at Wunderman, many of us have toyed around with it for quite some time now.

Users will be getting a 7-day grace period in which they can delete and hide all the content that they do not what to show. Once users have completed the changeover to Facebook timeline they will not be able to change back.

Wait a second, what exactly is a Facebook Timeline?

Facebook will be changing your wall, and instead of the standard one column on their ‘Wall’, users with the new Facebook Timeline will be presented with two columns. All previous information will also be sorted into chronological order allowing ‘Friends’ to visit any previously recorded events in their Facebook life.

Of course all events displayed on each user’s Facebook Timeline is completely controllable and users can even add or delete any previous event in their life.

Events are organised into five different categories – Work & Education, Family & Relationships, Home & Living, Health & Wellbeing, Travel & Experiences. Each of these is then subcategorised. If that’s not enough, users can customise their life event.

How will brand pages be affected?

Wunderman’s own Facebook insider has disclosed that ‘Facebook Timeline’ will be arriving for brand pages very soon but what exactly are the implications of this change?

At this time it is difficult to say with certainty what will happen but there are some pretty big clues:

• Visit the past in a single click – as mentioned above, Facebook Timeline allows users to go to any point in the page’s history. This means that users will have the ability to see any of their previous campaigns, posts and interactions on Facebook. Businesses may want to think about reviewing their Facebook interaction history, no matter how long that may be.
• · Life events – If the change also allows brand pages to add exact dates events, businesses may want to think about fully detailing their major events since they were first founded. Smaller businesses may even want to show when their employees joined – if employees agree that is.
• · Apps – One of the wonderful things about Facebook Timeline is that many apps show a ‘Recent Activity’ section. This is great for brands to showcase their activities on other social networks such as Pinterest.