Don’t freak out just yet, Facebook fans — er, friends. Facebook fans might freak out a little bit, as Facebook has officially rolled over its Timeline design to all Pages. Pages, we emphasize, not profiles: Brands pages and other “fan pages” often created by businesses, entertainers, and groups, not the individual profile pages of any particular Facebook member.
Confusing? Think of this this way: Coca-Cola is a Facebook Page. What you see when you log into Facebook, your individual Profile, is just that. You can “Like” Facebook Pages to subscribe to their stream of updates, which is a similar process to the official “Subscribe” functionality that you use to receive updates from individuals who aren’t your specific friends. Got it?
It remains to be seen when Facebook will officially flip the switch on Timeline for all of its 800-plus million monthly active users worldwide. The company has been slowly rolling out Timeline for swaths of users since late January, but Facebook hasn’t set an exact date for when it expects to have everyone transitioned over — whether they like it or not.
If you’re one of the Facebook fans who has either no interest in or no experience with Timeline, we’ve previously compiled a handy list of must-knows for the new Facebook format. It also helps to have a little bit of understanding about the differences between Facebook Page Timelines and Profile Timelines, given how often the two are accidentally mashed together in articles discussing Facebook feature rollouts.
The differences can be subtle. For example, Timeline now gives Page managers the option to manually “sticky” a post to the very top of their Facebook Pages. It’s a super-useful feature if you want to direct your massive Facebook audience to a particular destination based on a post you’ve made, but still want to update your page with successive posts in the meantime.
Facebook Profile pages, however, seem to be missing the glue. The most individual users can do within a Timeline is highlight a particular event or activity that previously transpired, which stretches the action to fill the entirety of one’s timeline instead of a single box in the left- or right-hand columns.
And, of course, Facebook Pages get full access to Facebook’s Insights analytics platform. Common Facebook Profiles can’t tell just how popular they’ve become or discern any trends from other users’ comments or likes on their posts, which is an interesting omission given that Facebook’s “Subscribe” feature turns profiles into almost mini-brands in themselves.
i like it better for my fishing brand page because of the large cover photo with timeline.