Building a Facebook Timeline for Higher Education

So what does the roll out of Facebook Timeline mean for higher education beyond bigger pictures and a new way of doing things? Plenty.

Colleges and universities around the country are always searching for better ways to tell their story. They struggle with the simple ways to talk about all they have going on. Timeline takes great strides to make it easier.

Timeline streamlines the brand experience into a scrollable story. It allows administrators to craft that story in ways the old wall never would.

The trick is that building that story takes time and effort. So while administrators have until March 30 to make adjustments as to how their timeline will appear, it’s best to start now. Here’s five quick tips to get you started while still in preview mode:

Select a Sweet Cover Pic

The cover pic is the most visible change to a Timeline-enhanced brand page. It’s bold and big — 851 x 315 pixels, to be exact. Use every last pixel to be creative and demonstrate the vibrant nature of campus. Do not take this opportunity to share another photo of a girl studying under a tree. We’ve seen that shot before.

Remember the rules: Cover pics cannot contain contact information, calls to action or references to other Facebook features. Essentially this means administrators can no longer put an arrow pointing to the ‘like’ button to increase a fan base.

Arrange Applications and Customize Appearance

Custom applications used to be banished to a small list on the left of a page where they were hard to organize and harder to find. No longer. The new Facebook Timeline allows administrators to add up to 12 applications to a page and selects the first four to highlight front and center.

These highlighted applications take up some prime real estate and there is no reason not to capitalize on that fact. Administrators can customize the images for each app (beyond the photos and videos) by editing the settings for each individual application. New images need to be 111 pixels high by 74 pixels wide.

Pin the Most Important Content

Seems pinning is the latest rage, even on Facebook. Timeline allows adminisrators to “pin” certain content to the top of a page for up to seven days before it falls back into place. It’s a great feature to highlight specific content and, in turn, push down content you’d rather not have people see.

Get Visual with Content

Most research on Facebook suggests photos are more engaging than the traditional status update. So why not get more visual? The new Timeline increased the size of common photos and allows certain posts to stretch across the page.

If Facebook is going to allow page admins to extend an image all the way across the page, use it when the time is appropriate.

Go Back in Time

History and tradition run deep at most colleges and universities and the “milestones” feature of Timeline is a great way to demonstrate it. Set milestones to define the key moments in an institution’s history. The milestones are added to a date selector running down the right side that tells the story of a school established long before Mark Zuckerberg built Facebook.

Adding milestones may take some time, but the rich content it adds is worth it. Special tip: Opt out of publishing each milestone to the feed you don’t want to flood fans’ streams as you build a school’s story.