Facebook Page Timeline

Finally Facebook announced Timeline for all Businesses to implement on Facebook pages. Facebook is giving page administrators the chance to preview, tweak, and publish their new design immediately, but the new design won’t be forced on you until March 30, 2012. In other words, you have until March 30 to play around with the new design without publishing before it must go live.

Timeline gives you an easy way to rediscover the things you shared, and collect your most important moments. It also lets you share new experiences, like the music you listen to or the miles you run.

Starting today, Timeline is now available everywhere, Here are some tips to help you get started-

Step- 1 How to Set Up your New Facebook Page –

• Upon logging in and accessing your Facebook business page as an administrator, you’ll be presented with the following message:
  
  

Start Tour: Click the green ‘Start Tour’ button to get started.

• Set Your Cover Photo –

In the ‘About’ section of the tour, you’ll first be prompted to choose what’s called a cover photo for your page. For pages, the cover photo dimensions are 851* 315 pixels. Choose an image that representative of your brand, and don’t be afraid to get creative with it

• Set Your Profile Picture –

Once you click ‘Next’, Facebook will prompt you to adjust your profile picture, which is the image that will get shown next to each of your updates on your wall and in users’ news feeds; it will also appear with any sponsored stories or ads that you run. A logo is a good choice here, but you can choose any image that is representative of your brand. Choose an image that fits 180*180 pixels.

Step-2: Organize Your Views & Apps

The new design features photos, likes, and apps at the top of your page below your cover photo. Photos are automatically features in the first spot, but page admins can rearrange the rest to feature the most important ones first. Admins can also customize the images that get shown for each app in this toolbar using the ‘Manage’>>’Edit Page’ dropdown via the ‘Admin Panel’, which is accessible at the top right of their business page.

Step 3: Star, Hide, or Pin

In step 3 of the tour, Facebook will prompt you to modify the items in your page’s timeline. By hovering over individual stories, you can make them wider, hide them from your timeline with the pencil icon, highlight them as important with the star icon, or delete them entirely.

A great new feature to note here is that you can pin/anchor a specific story to the top of your timeline for up to 7 days. This means you can highlight specific posts such as remarkable content, calls-to-action for your best marketing offers, or other events/ promotions you want to feature. Pinning it to the top of your page will prevent it from getting buried by more recent updates.

Step 4: Explore the Admin Panel

The new Admin Panel which, as we mentioned earlier, page admins can access from the link at the top right of their business page, allows admins to track all the activity on their page in one convenient place. From here, admins can easily respond to comments, edit their page settings, access Page Insights (i.e.Facebook page analytic), create new ads, and even change the name of their page.

Step 5: Enable Messages

The Facebook guided tour ends with information about messages, brand new features for business pages. Admins can now allow users to send them personal messages. This makes it much easier for admins to have private conversations with their fans. Use this feature when you need to discuss a topic or customer service issue in more depth, and when you’d prefer the conversation not be made public for all page visitors to see. Admins can also choose to turn off messaging capability by accessing the Admin Panel, choosing ‘Manage’>> ‘Edit Page’ >> ‘Manage Permissions,’ and unchecking the ‘Messages’ box.