After a few days of taking the new Facebook Timeline (for business pages) for a spin, we could safely say that we like it. Here’s our review…
It does take getting used to. Most of us don’t like change, especially if we’re used to something that works fine and has become second-nature to our habits. But since this new Timeline will be a mandatory change for business pages by March, 30th, we decided to roll up our sleeves and get familiar with it’s features.
What we love about Timeline is the ability to pin important posts to the top of the page. That’s very important, especially for businesses that interact with it’s customers and there is lively activity on the page. Important posts or announcements get pushed down the wall. So the pin is especially useful. And when that post is no longer that important, it can easily be unpinned. Lovely.
Timeline is very good at providing a “snapshot” of page activities. This feature gives the visitor a “big picture look” of what’s going on by showing what it thinks are highlights, without cluttering the page will all kinds of information. The nice thing here is that as you scroll down the page, the Timeline (that blue line in the middle, in between the 2 columns) gives you handy options. You can choose to drill down and have the page open up more, and show you everything that happened in that particular time period. You can see events by year and by month. Doing this shows you every single activity or wall post… to see what you want to see, when you want to see it. You’re the one who chooses to see. We LOVE this feature.
Another feature is if the page is using custom tabs for it’s special business tabs (the boxes up top, under the cover photo and beside the Photos tab), these tabs can also have custom icons that call attention to whatever else the business has to share. Our opinion is that these custom tabs enhance customer engagement — it allows both the business and user, other opportunities to interact more in another way. This is invaluable.
Except for the business tabs, it appears that Timeline for business pages on Facebook are very similar in characteristics to the Timeline for individuals. It just takes some getting used to.
All in all, we like it a lot. 🙂
