At the end of this month, Facebook will be changing business pages to the new timeline layout. Timeline has been around for personal accounts for a few months now and you may have noticed that some of your friends have switched to a more graphic, picture based profile. This will eventually become the norm, which is great news, as I personally think timeline looks very attractive.

The main feature of timeline is the eye-catching cover art at the top of the page. You can customise your cover picture, as well as your smaller profile picture in the bottom left hand corner. I find that it usually works best if you use a large picture of the interior of your premises or your products and your logo for your profile picture. A good example is this bakery page:

Other new features of timeline include personal messaging, and customisable modules showing your number of likes and photos. A handy element of the new layout is something called ‘milestones’. You can set this to show key dates in the history of your company such as when the company was founded. This is ideal if you have been established for a long time, but you’re relatively new to Facebook, as you can back-date relevant events.

Status updates have remained similar: you can run competitions through multiple choice questions, post links to your main website and add photos. Users can tag themselves in your photos and this is then shared on their timeline (and therefore visible to all their friends).

With this update, Facebook has made it easier than ever to set up an attractive business page with basic settings for free. Once you get started you have the option to customise your page further by creating your own apps, games and adding e-commerce functionality.

If you need a little extra help getting started, eSterling can provide support with set-up and customised page creation. We also run social media training courses to help you learn how to run your accounts independently so that you can make the most out of your Facebook account.

You can find out more about Facebook pages here: http://www.facebook.com/about/pages