Is Your Fan Page Prepared for Facebook’s Mandatory Timeline Changes?

On March 30th, Facebook is changing how they display your businesses fan page on their site.

Like your personal profile that recently changed to timeline, your business page will now follow in it’s footsteps.

Are you ready for all the changes?

Facebook Timeline Overview

The good news is that before March 30, you can preview the page and see what things will look like to help wrap your head around the changes. Just login into your personal account, then click into your business page. You’ll see a call out box about Timeline at the top where you click “preview.” Don’t worry, you can change with a click of link (before March 30) so you know what things will look like. You will see how much digital real estate is being dedicated to the cover photo, profile photo and timeline.

“On March 30, 2012, all Facebook Pages will get a new design.” Love Facebook

Here’s What’s Changing

• Cover Image – The new cover image replaces your default welcome tab. You no longer can choose a custom tab as a welcome screen to prompt people to “like” you page before interacting with it. And, there are rules in place on what you can and can’t do with that image (like adding a call to action on it). Dimensions are 850 x 315 pixels.
• Profile Photo - The original maximum profile image size before Timeline was 200 x 600 pixels. With Timeline, dimensions are restricted to 125×125 pixels.
• App Thumbnails – You can add thumbnail images to every app you have associated with your page. This is a good exercise in branding as you can make them all look consistent. Dimensions are 111 x 74 pixels.
• Milestones - You can now “go back in time” and add “milestones” for activities or events including important dates (when you were founded, etc), photos, messages or video. This is a wonderful way to tell your story in an interactive way.
• Post Highlights - You can make a post take up a whole row by “highlighting” it if. Just click the pencil in the upper right corner when you hover over it.
• Post Pinning – You can now pin posts to the top of the page. This could be a welcome message, photo from belt test, a special message, video,  or promotion for an upcoming event. Anything you want to highlight and draw attention to when someone first visits.
• Photo Positioning – You can adjust the positioning of any photo in your timeline that you or someone else publishes to your page. Just click the pencil graphic in the upper right and go from there.
• Photo Strip – The photo strip of that had 5 of your latest photos is now gone. However, the photo button link is still very prominent and shows your most recent photo.
• Wall Conversations – Conversations on the wall are now split up into two columns making them slightly harder to follow but as adoption of the new features becomes the norm, more will get used to it.
• Messaging – I love this update! Facebook Pages can now message other business pages. Not only that, but people can now message your Facebook page instead of having to just leave a post on your page for all to see.

If you didn’t know about this change, you still have a little time before your new page format goes live on March 30, 2012.

If you haven’t yet created a page, be sure to do this for your martial arts school as it’s a great way to keep in touch with your existing and past students as well as engage new ones.

As with any change to Facebook, it’s a good idea to read through their policies so you don’t inadvertently break one of their policies and get your page banned.

So, who has a Facebook fan page they have updated? Share a link to it in the comments below!

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