Facebook Timeline For Businesses – A Marketing Godsend?

With Facebook fast approaching the one billion-user mark, it’s a platform that has seen increased exposure since its inception and has become a cornerstone of everyday life for many.

A great number of businesses were quick to see this, and jumped onto Facebook as a means of advertising their services to a new audience in a new manner. More interaction and more ‘human’ relationships were developed; the positive effects in the form of a deeper rapport being instantly recognizable.

Since Facebook has allowed businesses to set up shop on their platform, little changes have been made to the standard business page format. Much the same,while superficial changes have been made to users’ pages over the years, nothing major has changed until the new Facebook timeline was unveiled in September 2011.

There has been a gradual shift since then; users are now able to opt-in to this new Timeline layout, before Zuckerberg and co make it a mandatory switch in the near future.

Personally, I’m no fan of the new timeline layout. As a marketer, however, I’m incredibly excited that Facebook has announced that business pages will be switching to this format too.

Overall, the new timeline design is more visually striking than the previous iteration’s simple text heavy ‘wall’ – this automatically means a more immersive and engaging brand experience.

New promotions will be able to be advertised more effectively, with images/advertisements taking advantage ofmore screen real estate when displayed on the timeline.

From a design standpoint, the album cover – the giant image splayed above the top of the screen – can also be used effectively as billboard space, either advertising new offline campaigns or housing call to actions and offers unique to that business’ Facebook presence (such as competition applications and the like).

The new Facebook timeline for businesses is sure to be an interesting change. While retaining all the old features of the wall – users are still able to make posts and receive answers to their questions – imagery and advertising space will now be a dominant feature of this new look.

To see examples of how this could look, be sure to check out speculative mock-ups of the business timeline on Mashable.

Are you excited for these changes? How do you see businesses being able to take advantage of the new format? Please leave your thoughts in the comments below!

Adrian Norman

Adrian is Thinktank’s creative mastermind who loves ‘pushing pixels around the screen for hours on end’ – the end results of which are our incredible designs (including this very site!)

Adrian is the office DJ, keeping tunes flowing through Thinktank HQ daily and is very good at taking requests from the rest of the team to balance out his self confessed poor taste in music.

Outside of work Adrian keeps busy by educating himself on the intricacies of the culinary process. We’re not saying he’s a contender for the office bake off just yet, but it’s a work in progress.