Apparently more people in the world have Facebook than they do kettles. I don’t know whether this is true or not but I want to believe it. I have a kettle and I have Facebook – this must mean that I’m a fully fledged member of the twenty-first century. Admittedly I couldn’t live without either. Well, perhaps that’s not quite true. Given the choice I’d keep the kettle – I wouldn’t be able to face the world, let alone Facebook without a cup of tea at 8am.
Whether you resisted or embraced the change, everyone of Facebook’s 900 million users has now been moved over to the new timeline format. I’m getting used to it. I think it’s rather good actually. People moan – they always do when Facebook alters/is temporarily unavailable. Perhaps Facebook deprivation is a greater torture than tea/coffee deprivation?
Timeline does offer the user a greater control over the look of their profile page. There are some opportunities to be taken, especially if you’re responsible for your company’s profile. Timeline has made Facebook into an even greater marketing tool.
Say your company has a new product – timeline allows you to pin posts to the top of your page for seven days. Everything else that is posted on your wall will automatically fall beneath it. After a week the pinned post will drop down to the original date it was published. For similar reasons, timeline also lets you draw attention to a post by expanding it across the full width of the page. Simply click ‘highlight’.
The page tabs are the most useful new feature. You can dedicate specific tabs to specific areas of your business. Each one has its own URL so you can direct traffic to individual tabs from the company website.
The Activity Log which appears alongside the other tabs will probably need some attention. Left unaltered, Facebook will have entered some irrelevant dates of activity itself. It might be advisable to select a few key dates in your company’s development and enter them into the log.
One of the most notable differences between timeline and the old feed page format is the addition of the cover photo. It does take a while to obtain a photo which firstly fits the allocated space and, secondly doesn’t appear stretched or pixelated. The profile picture still exists but it’s much smaller in size. To make the most of the two spaces for photos – use the profile picture box to feature your company’s logo and then use the cover photo to display a new product. The two can tie in quite well together to look like a complete company advert.
Facebook makes up 59% of all news consumed online. That fact is true. So if you want your company’s news to be widely consumed, update your profile to suit the timeline format. After all, it is designed to increase client traffic and improve navigation.
Did you know that if Facebook were a country it would be the world’s third largest country, after India and China? In the twenty minutes it’s taken me to write this post, over 10 million comments will have been posted and shared. In the time it takes to boil a kettle around 122,000 people will have logged on. No wonder fewer people have kettles, there’s no time for a cuppa – get facebooking!