Got the Facebook Timeline Blues?

Facebook Timeline has made my life very busy! It took me a couple of weeks to digest all of the changes and start loving it, but I am there! Well, loving MOST of it! I’ve been sending out emails and working one-on-one with clients, all intended to make sure they were aware of, and understood, the changes. Last week I taught two separate classes at CoHab to about 35 folks who were very interested in learning all of the details. There were lots of questions and, maybe like you, many of them are trying to comprehend the why’s and wherefore’s of Facebook’s grand design.

During one of my Facebook training sessions last week, we were discussing the new capability of back dating a post. One of my class participants suggested that this would be a great tool for those times when you want to add a lot of posts or pictures from an event, but you aren’t adding them “live.” So, let’s say you go to the event one week. On the following week you finally get around to entering the pictures and comments. You could change the date to reflect when the event actually occurred. Nice.

Another cool thing I did last week was to host my first live Facebook Chat.  It was a fast-paced hour of responding to a lot of marketing questions, and of course some about the new Timeline! Some of the questions were coming in live, and some of them had been posted earlier in the day. It was a lot of fun. However, that goofy Timeline made it a little harder to keep up with things. Thank goodness for the very prominent Page Notifications (live it!) and Posts By Others box. Normally, the Post By Others box is not something I appreciate, but in this case, I didn’t have to go marching all over to see who was posting what. I could go to one place and see them all!

While trolling around looking at Page after Page, I’ve seen some really cool branding, and picked up some good ideas. And, one thing that jumped out is how much Timeline is optimized for photos. Take a look at a Page that posts a lot of pictures. I see it on quite a few restaurant pages. They tend to take snaps of whatever the daily special is and post them about 10:30am…just about that time when everyone is starting to think about where they are going for lunch! Here’s a good example: (https://www.facebook.com/ralphandkacoosbossier)  Scroll down and see how great their page looks with all of the nice photos! Makes you want to run out and upload some more photos of your own!

On another note, I’m still waiting to hear a good reason from Facebook why they are putting an old, random post at the top of my Timeline. It just seems to serve no marketing purpose and is taking up valuable real estate.