Acting as an overview of your entire life (or at least the part since joining Facebook), the timeline displays all of your photos, posts, ‘likes’ and friend requests. While this may sound awful, given that most people won’t want photos of their student days popping up, it actually seems to have been done in a very elegant and eye catching way – just take a look at some of the examples on Facebook’s site. Users have also been given the opportunity to edit their timeline before it goes live, allowing them to take down any embarrassing blasts from the past.
For a B2B PR agency, there are a couple of points to consider. The first is obviously how this will affect brands. At the moment, brands can’t have a Facebook timeline. However, Facebook hasn’t ignored the enormous potential to create attractive, image-led company pages and there are some mock-ups of what a timeline could look like for businesses (including Burberry and Coca-Cola) on Mashable. So it will be interesting to see how Facebook implements the business-focused timeline.
The other fascinating point is that these updates show how hard Facebook is working to keep ahead of its competitors such as Google+ and Twitter. In striving to achieve the next big innovation in social media, Facebook is doing much more than the standard, text-heavy layouts that define so many social media applications today. As a result, the timeline looks miles ahead of anything else being offered on social media platforms. The question is, what will other platforms do to catch up?
At Aspectus, we’re constantly keeping an eye on the social media landscape to see how we can best harness new developments for our clients. And as soon as Facebook timeline for brands becomes available, we’ll be first in line to explore its PR potential.
