Whether we like it or not Facebook timeline is coming – and it’s only 3 days away! Facebook will transition all profiles and pages to “Timline” on March 30th, question is, will you be ready? We’ve got a couple tips to have your new timeline look nice instead of empty!
So if you don’t prepare in advance, what would your timeline look like? Probably something like this:
But if you prepare you can have a lovely looking profile that would look something more like this:
Obviously the second option looks much nicer for your business!
There’s a couple of steps that you’ll need to follow. For starters, you need to prepare your timeline. If you do it before the automatic transition you can visit Facebook’s Introducing Timeline page. Here they provide a brief explanation of the major differences and on the bottom bar, presuming you have not previously pre-viewed timeline, you can select “get timeline”. This will send you to a place where you can give timeline a test drive on your profile/business page without making it live yet. So you can fiddle and play around without everyone seeing all the tweaking that you’re doing.
So what do you do once you’re in the editing screen? Two big things you’ll want to do, check and make sure your profile picture still works and maybe update it if it doesn’t, and also add a cover picture. In case you’re not super familiar/comfortable with facebook highlighted below are the areas I’m talking about:
You may already have a great profile photo, if you do great, that part’s done. But if you had a professionally designed side-bar style image for the old layout, it may not work well any more. Here you can either put a headshot or if you’re more that just a one-person operation a logo (preferably in a square orientation!) may be a better option. Keep in mind, this image will be what people see in their newsfeed when you’re doing any posts – so people need to associate the image with your company whatever you choose.
The big question is for a lot of people, what kind of image to you put as your “cover” image? There’s two different ways you could go. You can have one designed for you, like the one we’ve designed for our page, or you can put up pretty much any nice picture. For photographers this can be a great way to showcase a recent excellent shot you’ve taken, for someone with a product that they make/distribute you could put a shot of that as well. I know a cake designer that’s put a shot of some beautiful cupcakes that she decorated, all great options. This can be a very cost effective option as well as you can have your page look professional without paying someone to make custom images for you.
One thing to keep in mind, if you decide to design a custom image do know that sometimes when the page loads only part of your cover image will show until someone scrolls up. So make sure you keep that in mind when you design/have your image designed for you. Here’s an example of what I mean:
View before scrolling up:
View after scrolling up:
As you can see, that’s a pretty significant portion of the image that people may not even see! So if you design an image without thinking about that it’s possible your visitor may not see the whole thing or they may think your image was poorly designed because it gets chopped awkwardly.
So there you go – when timeline comes you can be ready for it too and keep looking professional – even if it’s just a couple of picture changes! If you or someone you know isn’t super facebook savvy and wants a hand with their profile or page we’d love assisting! Check out Facebook’s web page specifically about Facebook Pages if you have questions too.
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