Facebook Timeline: Meeting the deadline.

As the deadline for Facebook timeline looms, we wanted to share a few tips to get your pages ready. Facebook will soon migrate your page to the new Timeline, whether you’re ready or not. If you don’t make changes soon, you’ll be stuck with a page that looks broken. Here are three tips to get you through the deadline.

It can start with “The birth of the human race” if you want it to. Facebook’s timeline allows you to post before you joined Facebook, before the Internet was born, even before Mark Zuckerberg was born (way back in the mid 80s).

2. When loading up historical Milestones, hide them from the newsfeed.

Here’s a great example of what not to do when creating a timeline. Dos Equis has been updating their timeline and it’s flooding my personal wall, drawing a lot of negative comments. If they want me to stay thirsty for Dos Equis, they need to respect my personal space. When creating a timeline, and especially when loading a lot of historical entries at once, don’t forget to check the “Hide from newsfeed” option so that your users don’t get flooded with old events.

3. Make sure your cover photo is sized at 851 x 315 pixels.

It looks unprofessional and unattractive to have a pixilated, scaled-up, or improperly framed picture. If you don’t have a designer, you can use a free app like: http://timelinecoverbanner.com to make your cover photo look positively smashing.

Some other useful dimensions:

• Profile photo should be sized at 180 x 180 pixels (scale down to 30 X 30 pixels)
• Custom tab image photos should be 111 x 74 pixels