Facebook rolled out the Timeline for Businesses on February, 29 2012. It is in preview mode through March 30, 2012, so developers and businesses have time to gear up for the change.

So what does Timeline mean for you and your business and your promotions?

1 — It means a bigger image for your brand and your promotions.

You now get a giant image as a cover photo. Like the larger photos on personal profiles, brands will now have a cover photo of 851×315 pixels to clarify their identity, showcase their creativity and highlight their current promotional campaigns.

You can change these photos out at any time, which works great for our clients that have ever changing promotions,  but you do have to adhere to the Facebook cover photo guidelines. These include:

• Price or purchase information, such as “40% off” or “Download it at our website”
• Contact information, such as web address, email, mailing address or other information intended for your Page’s About section
• References to user interface elements, such as Like or Share, or any other Facebook site features
• Calls to action, such as “Get it now” or “Tell your friends”

2 – It means a bigger canvas for your Facebook applications.

The narrow 500 pixel width of your old apps is no more. You now get 800 pixels of width.  Your old apps will still work just like before – but they will be centered in the 800 pixel window. Tip: If you are mid-campaign and want to take advantage of that space, we recommend you add a background and avoid having to make costly development changes.

3 – It means goodbye landing page.

The choice of a default page for brands is no longer an option. The default page is now Timeline. Period.

This means that if you have a hot new promotional application, you will not be able to make that application the default landing page, and you will need to rely on driving traffic to the application from your cover photo and application icons instead.

4 – It means less real estate to showcase your applications.

Timeline will allow only four featured applications or widgets (such as Likes, photos, etc.) to be displayed, as opposed to the former left menu navigation links to all applications. The other applications and widgets will be hidden from the default view and a user will need to look for them. Each application will also get a small image to showcase it instead of a simple text link – but without being in the default view not many people will see it. Companies can choose what these four apps will be– so plan and choose wisely.

5 — It means more control over the past.

The timeline will show all the posts dating back to when the Facebook Page was set up for the business. Companies may want to decide on the posts they may want to alter, hide or lose altogether (like promotions that are over). This activity page can be accessed at http://www.facebook.com/help/activitylog. You can also update information to indicate major milestones in a company’s existence and growth back to the year 1800.

6 – It means you can control featured content.

Some posts can be made to appear more prominently than others by highlighting them or by pinning them to the top of a page. To highlight a post you click the star icon and that post will then occupy the full width of the page instead of the two columns of all default posts.  To pin a post, you click on the edit icon in a post and the click the ‘pin to top’ option.  This post resides on top as a pinned post with an icon indicating it has been pinned for 7 days.  These options give you the ability to feature the things you want at any given time.

7 – It means your customers can speak to you directly.

Timeline gives users the ability to connect with the administrators of a page by sending direct messages, similar to a personal page message capability. This could prove useful during promotions for people to pose questions directly to the brand instead of to the wall!

8 – It means more ad opportunities!

While not entirely a fallout of the timeline change, Facebook ads are also evolving with the design changes. The four locations where ads will be featured include the brand’s Timeline, news feeds (including those on mobile devices), right side of the landing page and the log-out page.  ‘Offers’ – a means for companies to share promotions and discount coupons — is being rolled out now. Pictures in ads are sized to be 110×80 pixel and text limited to 25 characters for header and 135 characters for body copy. We should see more on this in the coming weeks.

So what do I do now?

If you are puzzled about these changes and how to put them into practice, Facebook has a getting started guide.

Currently businesses can preview how the timeline version of Facebook Business page will look like and publish the Timeline to live if desired. Some businesses like Kia and Coca-Cola have already made the switch.  However, Marden-Kane recommends you get a lay of the land first before you make the jump. Timeline becomes mandatory on March 30, 2012.  Be ready!

Note: As of today, March 2, 2012, Facebook still has not fixed a bug for Timeline view that keeps any Like-gated Facebook applications from refreshing to the updated version of the page after the user “Likes” the brand. If you have any applications that rely on a “Like” of your brand page we highly recommend you hold off publishing Timeline until this is fixed.

Here’s the bug page: https://developers.facebook.com/bugs/228778937218386

Hopefully a solution is forthcoming…