Facebook Timeline for Pages now live!

Facebook have just made Timeline live for all Pages! As well as We Are Social’s (the 1st agency with a timeline?), you can see Coca Cola’s below – and other brands that already have them live include Jaguar, Dove, Xbox, Ford, Starbucks, Nike, Burberry, Louis Vuitton, Red Bull, Tiffany & Co., The New York Times, Unilever and perhaps the best so far, Manchester United.

The big news, outside of the new Timeline format, is that Page owners have lost the ability to specify a landing page – making landing pages and fangates redundant (to be clear, apps are still allowed, but they can no longer sit behind a “like” gate).

Facebook seems to be rolling out their lists feature to pages, too, giving users the option to “Add to Interest Lists” to create news feeds of related posts, in a similar way to how friend lists work at the moment. Interestingly, users do not have to Like a page to be able to use this function.

Facebook have also introduced private messaging with fans (as we suspected they would), which is a policy change for Facebook, who previously made it against regulations to contact fans privately. This is a great feature, especially for customer service agents, who can now request personal information in a private way.

The revamped admin panel includes a new Activity Log, giving page owners greater visibility of the activity on their Timeline. From here, admins can choose whether to hide or delete posts, and can also highlight them in a double width feature on their Timeline. Page admins also have the option to hide fan posts from the page until approved in the Activity Log – this will undoubtedly be a useful feature for brands in time of crisis, allowing them to monitor and manage conversations without going to the drastic measure of turning fan posts off all together.

Another very useful feature for Pages – especially those with multiple Admins – is the Activity Log:

The Activity Log is accessed via the ‘Manage’ menu in the Admin Panel. This feature allows Admins to see a sequential timeline of activity on the page, highlighting things that Admins have posted, who has been posting direct to the walls (including the page’s Fans), and what the specific post was about.

A key part of the Activity Log is a menu that allows Admins to perform a range of functions on individual posts – this drop-down menu can be accessed via the little icon that appears at the far right-hand side of each post in the Activity Log view (the icon will vary dependent on whether that post has been allowed, whether it’s ‘Highlighted’, etc.):

And also, it appears Facebook is now revealing much much more data about Page’s fanbases to non-admins, including a 1 month historical graph of both ‘People Talking About’ and a brand new metric, ‘New Likes per Week’ – here’s Coca Cola’s info to illustrate:

To learn more, Inside Facebook, Econsultancy and TechCrunch have good guides covering other aspects of the new feautures, take a look at the comprehensive FAQ on the changes that Facebook have published or what they’re calling an ‘interactive course’ to ‘help you use Facebook Pages to tell your story, express your identity, and connect with your audience’. Alternatively here’s Facebook’s Pages product guide (pdf) which walks through the main changes:

Finally, one last word from Mugatu: