Confused about Facebook’s new timeline display for fan pages?

I found this great cheat sheet to help you get your page organised quickly and working well!

Before I show you, a word about running Facebook chats on your fan page…

A quick splurge of new posts by fans (such as questions during a one hour chat for example) can make it confusing to keep track of, due to the visual layout of the timeline page. Here’s how you can make it easier:

1. At the top of the page, but underneath the main header/banner image, is a faded text box that says ‘Highlights’. This means the page is only showing highlights of what’s been posted to the page, and you may miss some of the posts. Click on the little ‘down arrow’ and a drop down box will show some options for how to display things on the page.

2. Click ‘Posts by others’ to show the posts made to the page by fans. This is good if you are hosting a Q & A session/chat and want to be able to answer individual questions.

3. If you are providing the questions for fans to answer, or hosting something like a book club chat, then click ‘Posts by page’ so you can see all the questions you have posted and check the comments for each one.

4. Keep refreshing the page to see the most current posts and comments.

5. An alternative to using pages for chats, is to create a Facebook group that is associated with your page, and use that for the interactive sessions. The groups page layout resembles the ‘old’ simple Facebook, where you just see posts in a linear way, one on top of the other, with the most recently commented on post at the top. You can even create different groups for different chats, so that the chat sessions don’t interrupt your main page’s functioning and confuse visitors if they don’t realise a chat is going on.

You can make the group open so it is easier for fans to participate, or add more security by making it a secret group in which you have to manually add members, or people can request to join. This is more of a hassle, but can be good for chats that you don’t want visible to the public. Remember, everything you post on a Facebook page is 100% visible to anyone in the world (your Facebook ‘friend’ profile can be visible publically too, unless you adjust your settings and posts to ‘friends only’). You can tell if your posts are public by the presence of a little ‘world globe’ icon under your posts, so if you have this and don’t want complete strangers seeing your posts, change your settings quick smart! Also, if you comment on someone’s public post (ie; their post has a globe icon under it), then your comment will be made public.

Now, back to the cheat sheet for setting up and organising your Facebook timeline page:

Facebook Page Timeline Design Cheat Sheet