“Timeline makes everything more accessible”

Has Facebook’s recent introduction of Timeline changed the way brands are operating on the social network? Michael Litman thinks so.

Timeline is the latest shift in the displaying of content on Facebook, which was initially only available for personal profiles and is now available for brands too. ‘Timeline’ is simply described as a collection of the photos, stories, and experiences that tell your story. The redesigned version of the user profile – launched by Facebook recently at f8 – gives brands a much more visual canvas for their content.

The move over to Timeline is the biggest redesign for pages in recent history and seeks to create a more unified look and feel for both personal and brand profile pages. Facebook hopes that Timeline will help you rediscover the things you shared, and collect your most important moments. It looks to further blend the line between your real world self and your online self on Facebook.

“It’s the heart of your Facebook experience, completely rethought from the ground up. Timeline is the story of your life” said Zuckerberg when launching the redesign.

What’s interesting to me about Timeline is that it makes everything more accessible. Some won’t like this: it may just illustrate to them how much they actually put out on social networks like Facebook. But it’s almost as if your brand’s life is now being played out year by year within Timeline. It’s like an online scrapbook of activity. You can now click through the years and go back to when you first joined Facebook. It now lets you create what they call ‘milestones’ too. These are points in your life that you want to highlight.

Facebook is actively encouraging personal users to recreate their real lives through Timeline, making it into a personal blogging platform. And for brands, this is a massive opportunity to give users a deeper insight in to their company history and gives them more reason to engage with the brand.

The New York Times has content on its Timeline going all the way back to when they were founded in 1851. Coca-Cola too has dated content back to 1886 and Pizza Hut goes back to 1958.

Manchester United FC has also been lauded for its visual messaging strategy. Timeline puts a lot more emphasis on rich media content over plain text so it’s worth your time checking out the MUFC page to see how they have taken advantage of this by frequently posting photos of players, matches and giving a behind the scenes look at the club.

But what about brands that don’t have history stretching back hundreds of years? Spotify was founded in 2006, but even without a long company history it’s making fantastic use of Timeline. The company has provided a visual and aural comprehensive look at the early beginnings of music with content dating back to the year 1001 AD. It says:“We’ve decided to turn our fan page into a destination where you can discover and listen to the history of music. If you’re looking to learn when Frank Sinatra released his first album, what year Monteverdi was born, when Britney released …Baby One More Time, what were the biggest music stories in 1969, or just how old you were when L’il Wayne put out Tha Carter III then we’ve got you covered.”

Another favourite of mine is by Maria Mayor, a student at Hyper Island who has created ‘My Social CV’ using Timeline as her CV with great effect.

It’s clear that Facebook is looking to move brands away from measuring likes and more towards building a magazine style, regular series of brand building, engaging content that fans will become immersed in the world of the brand and come back more regularly. This is a positive move from Facebook to focus more on brand stories and content which will in turn seek to drive brand engagement rather focusing purely on measuring success based on likes