Today marked a day that we have been anticipating for a few weeks now. No not leap day, but the launch of Facebook’s timeline for Brand Pages. Brands have an option to now preview or publish their brand pages with the comprehensive roll-out happening on March 30, 2012.

Instead of going into a lot of detail out of the gate, I am changing the normal format and going with a more visual representation of changes as well as guidelines for some of the changes based on my roll-out of the BlackFin360 Timeline Brand Page.

Below is an example of the Legacy posts / Brand Milestones. Note the ability to append location & date and to post current & back-dated updates without pushing into the newsfeed. Also note that milestones will appear as full-page width updates vs. the staggered approach used for regular updates.

Once the milestone is published, you have the option to “pin the post” to create a semi-static piece of content towards the top of your brand timeline. Pins can be stories, photos, videos, campaigns, tab cross promotion, contests, etc… this is handy for promotions and highlighting key events or even simply highlighting your fan of the week. Once you have pinned a piece of content it has a “bookmark” signifying that it has been pinned.

Example of a pinned post

In future posts we will explore the ins and outs of the changes as well as what happened to custom landing pages as well as Like gating. But for now enjoy the visuals.

Follow Tom Edwards @BlackFin360