Facebook to release timeline for brands this month

February 17, 2012 | Online Marketing

Facebook will bring its Timeline profile pages to brands this month in the U.S., according to executives briefed on the company's plans. The new pages for brands will start in beta with a handful of partners and then be released to more marketers in stages.

So what will Timeline for brands look like? For one, the tabs or apps marketers currently host on their Facebook pages to sell products or take polls may turn into boxes on the brand's Timeline, much like how apps for Spotify or Washington Post Social Reader live on users' Timelines.

The format change could put the onus on brands to develop their own apps using custom verbs other than "like," in the same vein as Pinterest, which has a Facebook app that tracks when its users have "pinned" something. Promoting the use and development of "Open Graph" apps, which can have their data tapped for ad targeting, is an area of increased focus for Facebook.

Timeline has significant implications for Facebook fan-page management. One top consideration is that a brand's Facebook presence no longer must date to when it joined the site but can be represented with content populating its Timeline from throughout its history.

Get the full story at Advertising Age

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