Facebook’s Timeline – This Makes So Much Sense

True confession–I have not been a big Facebook fan. I always recommend to my clients that they should have a Professional Facebook Page. It is free and relatively easy to set up and there are benefits. But my priorities in the Internet marketing world have always related  to Google search. Create a great website that is attractive and easy to navigate, one that positions high up on the local Google business map when someone does a search for a dentist in their geographical area.  In my experience, I continue to see a strong correlation between a well-positioned website and new patients calling the office.

But new evidence shows that there are almost as many searches for a dentist on Facebook as there are on Google. So with the advent of Facebook’s Timeline, now may be the time to upgrade your Facebook presence. Here are three good reasons why.

1. Additional real estate– with the wider profile of Timeline, you have more of an opportunity to tell your story graphically with a bigger logo and bigger and more dramatic photos. It gives you the feel of a website on your Facebook page.
2. Pinned posts–in the old Facebook format, any post you made about an offer–like a free exam or a discount on Zoom whitening–would quickly fall off of your live feed page. Now you can “pin” or attach that offer to the top of your Facebook page so the offer stays visible at the top of the page for seven days or until you unpin it.
3. Icons–in the old format, any icons were very small and appeared as a list below your small photo or logo on the left side of the page. Now with the open layout and wider format, the icons can be much bigger–similar to the buttons on your website. In my case, with my new layout, Get my Blog and Videos are now prominently displayed. Click here to see the before and after of my new Facebook page. I think you will agree the differences are pretty dramatic.

I want to thank Tim Healy and his talented team at TNT Dental for all of their extraordinary efforts in creating my new website,  my new mobile website, and my new Facebook page. I am especially grateful to them for the screenshots they were able to create on this post and the two previous ones that make it easy for people to see what I’m describing. I also want to thank my good friends Rich and Dave Madow who teach a fabulous course on Social Media. I took their course three years ago, and it provided me the inspiration and the technical knowledge to begin a journey that continues uninterrupted to this day.

On March 30^th, whether you like it or not, Facebook is going to force the timeline change, so any custom work you have done under the old format will look funky and possibly distorted. And if you are not prepared in some fashion, you are not going to look good under the new format either. So don’t delay. Speak with your technical people and take the appropriate action. And please remember to Like us on Facebook!