March 30 marks the official launch of Facebook Timeline for businesses and pages. Why does this matter to you? Well, for starters, if you’re a business owner, you’ll need to revisit your page design and make any changes necessary. And if you’re just a person, this means Facebook is one step closer to launching timeline to your personal profile page.
If you haven’t yet launched timeline or want to know a little bit more about what it offers you – check out my blog post from the beta launch.
The biggest design change is the cover photo. This is a photo that you can upload into Facebook or you can use an existing photo from your Facebook albums. The cover photo can be about 720 pixels wide by 265 pixels high. Your profile photo is now 180 pixels square. One rule you must follow is there should never be a “call-to-action” in the cover photo – that means no “like this page!” or “enter this contest”. Facebook will find you and call you out and may even shut your page down. What this top area is great for is as a place to showcase YOU (whether that’s you or your business). (the upper left image is an example of what my company, Teradata, has done)
Business owners – one of the new features I love about the new timeline for pages is that it allows you to contact your fans as the page. This is great because it protects your privacy as the administrator and doesn’t require you to use your personal account to interact with the page.
Of course, with any Facebook changes, it’s a good idea to always take a time-out and check your privacy options. I would check:
1) the default privacy settings dropdown in the upper right corner and
2) the privacy settings in the profile edit screen. These areas give you pretty much full control over who sees what.
To double-check that you aren’t showing the world your most intimate details, I would advise to use the “View As” feature on your profile page (under your cover photo in the gear dropdown). This allows you to see how a friend, non-friend, certain friends view your profile.
Please comment below and let me know of any other questions/concerns you may have and I will be do my best to answer!
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