Despite some public resistance, Facebook is slowly converting everyone over to the Timeline. Because this has been causing some panic among my Facebook friends, I wanted to take the time and give you a quick rundown on how to navigate and customize your new Timeline!
To start, head over to www.facebook.com/about/timeline to convert your profile over to Timeline and click the button at the bottom if you haven’t already done so. Currently, if you do the conversion on your own, you have seven days to view and edit your content from the when you start the conversion. When you are happy with your Timeline, click the ‘publish’ button at the top.
Cover Image: The cover image is essentially a large banner that stretches across your entire profile. Some may use this space to market their business, show case products or simply for personal use. Here are two examples below:
To begin to customize your Cover image, you can either upload a current photo or create something fancy within Photoshop, Pixlr or Gimp. To create something unique, make sure your new image is 851 x 315 pixels. You will notice that you still have a profile picture at the lower left hand corner of the cover. This is separate from your Cover photo and can be changed too.
The Timeline: Timeline is essentially a digital scrapbook of your life that begins when you were born and then organizes all of the a
dditional information you have been feeding Facebook over the years such as when you got married, graduated from college, got a new job, etc and creates milestones. It will also pick highlights from when you joined Facebook and insert photos, wall posts and events. It’s easy to edit these milestones and highlights by hovering over each in the upper-right hand corner of the box. You can also choose to highlight stories by clicking on the star in the same corner.
Your Info: People can now access your information from directly underneath your profile picture. By clicking ‘about’ visitors will come to a separate page that organizes your life into smaller, concise chunks, such as About You, Living, Family, Education. You can also add memories to each of these boxes if you want to share more then what Facebook already has provided.
Apps: You will now find that there is even further integration with companies that you may be familiar with such as Iheartradio, Netflix, Spotify and Nike with 
the new Timeline. Once (and if) you grant permission to these companies, you will see that they will be posting to your Timeline on your behalf. For instance, do you use Spotify to stream music on the Internet? You will see Spotify posting what you are listening to. People can click on this information and listen to your music along with you.
Privacy: This seems to be one of the biggest pieces that people want information on when it comes to Facebook. Due to all of the recent changes, you may want to go back and make sure that your privacy settings have remained the same. To do this click on the white triangle in the right-upper hand corner of the blue menu bar and click on ‘Privacy Settings’. Permissions for apps has also changed, so you will only need to grant permission once for them to post on your account. Once the permission is granted, they will continue to have access to posting to your profile until you unauthorize the apps permissions. So take a look from to time to time at your account and privacy settings to make sure they are set the way you want to them to.
How can you take advantage of these changes: Timeline offers some interesting marketing opportunities for you as a small business and professional. Here is a short list of some of the things you can do to show off a little more of who you are from the professional standpoint using Timeline’s features:
- Create a cover image that displays your specialties, awards, achievements and accomplishments. Were you spotlighted in a magazine? Use photo editing software and create a cover image using the article.
- Do you have business milestones? Make sure you include those in your Timeline. When did you graduate from college? When did you open the doors of your business? When did you expand into a new city?
- Are you a speaker? Make sure you add your locations to the map at the top of your profile. Include where you were at, what you spoke on and photos if you have some.
Eventually, there will be a major facelift to your Facebook Business Page as well. Experts predict within spring of 2012. Will the Timeline feature be the facelift? No one can say for sure, but I can almost guarantee you that some of these features that you see will be a piece of the upcoming changes to Facebook Business Pages.
Have a question on a Facebook Time line feature? Post it here in the comments or on my Facebook page.
