Building and Managing your new Facebook Timeline Page
Facebook have decided, in their divine wisdom, to change the way that Facebook fan pages are going to be displayed on the site. These changes will be mandatory and will take effect at the end of March, so redesigning your company Facebook page is something that needs to really be put to the top of the priority list.
The new changes have came about with the introduction of Facebook’s ‘timeline’. Here at Wow Internet, we are fans of the new changes as, in our opinion, the new layout offers more room for creativity and a chance to do something unique with your social media marketing. However, with any major change there are also going to be people who are not fans of the new designs, especially if you have just forked out a large sum of cash to have your Facebook page designed using the old standards! One other slight problem, which we are assuming it will be a short amount of time before Facebook fixes this, is that the new fan pages don’t automatically refresh once a user has clicked ‘Like’ which can cause the fan-gate designs to no longer function.
So how do you go about designing your new page then? Well, the first bit of design is the cover image (dimensions are shown below) and this will be the first thing that the user sees as they enter the page. As well as this is the profile image, which is a lot smaller than the cover image but it slightly overlays it.
Now, we wont go into all the different applications that you can install and use on your Facebook page as the chances are that you know about these already, however, one thing to note is that there is a wider space available in the iframe apps now (810px) so any of your previous designs might need some slight tweaks to fill out the extra space.
There are some great features that can be used on the timeline itself. When you have posted something to the Facebook page, or if someone also has; there are several different things you can do to make it stand out more. One of these things is to ‘pin’ the post so that it stays at the top of the feed for 7 days (giving it much more attention than other posts. You can do this by clicking the little pencil icon in the top-right of the post and click ‘Pin to Top’, as is shown below.
Another good option that can be done is to ‘feature’ a post by clicking the star icon in the top-right of the post. This will expand the post to be shown across the full width of the page, which is great for showing off a promotion to your followers. As well as this, you can create ‘milestones’, for example; showing the founding of your company or the reaching of your 1000th ‘like’. You can create a milestone by pressing the button that is next to the status update box and entering the information. This will then be displayed as a featured post on the page. We created one to show the launch of our new website, which is shown below:
These are just a few of the new features that can be taken advantage of. There is also the new admin settings for building your audience, tracking activity and a new-look insights tab. Go on and check it out for yourself and have a play around, but remember to get your designs finalised by the end of March!
Why not check out our new Facebook page in the meantime 🙂
