Looking At The New Facebook Timeline

The new Facebook timeline for pages has made a splash today.  The items that will have the most impact on page curators are:

• A default landing page is no longer possible. (That's the page often used to encourage visitors who have not yet Liked the page to Like the page, before they move on to the wall.)

But...

• You can pin one post to the top of timeline (you'll find the button for that in the dropdown behind the edit pencil in the post). (According to Social Fresh you can only pin an item for seven days.)
• You can highlight a post by clicking the star in the post tools.  This will make it spread out across the whole two-column width of the timeline.
• You have some flexibility to change the date of a post on the timeline to move it around.
• The first tab picture is locked on photos.  But you can reorder the rest.  To do that click the dropdown icon to the right of the three visibile tab images to reveal all your tabs.  Then hover over the top right hand corner of one of the tab images to get an editing pencil.

A post cannot be highlighted and then pinned to the top of the timeline.  A pinned post will only fill the first column of the timeline, making it the top left post on the page.

And one other slightly unsettling issue which I encountered: your page timeline will ask you to set a start date.  After doing that I had a look at my personal timeline to find every post I'd ever done had disappeared.  I'm hoping this situation resolves itself. (Please comment if this has also happened to you.) - (UPDATE: My personal timeline posts were gone for about 6 hours - I filed a bug report on Facebook and after disappearing at around 6 a.m. my posts returned at around 3 p.m.)

Also there's been some talk about the ability to change your page url.  This is only possible, it says in  Facebook's notes, if you have fewer than 100 Likes on the page. (See Facebook Pages: Bugs and Known Issues.)

All Facebook sums up the changes here: 7 Crucial Things About Timeline For Facebook Pages.

Mashable has a similar article: Facebook Brand Timelines: 6 Big Changes Every Marketer Needs to Understand.

As a nice complement to these, SocialFresh has a page with links to ten examples of new timeline pages:  10 Facebook Page Timeline Cover Examples. Who knew Manchester United's Facebook page had over 22 million page Likes?

And just a final observation (made with a smile) that "timeline" is a misnomer, since your posts don't move chronologically down one column of the page and then over to the next, making straight lines.  The posts zig-zag down the page, just as they do in your personal timeline - or timezig-zag.  Should Facebook have worked harder to find a more accurate name?