Expanding Your Sphere: The Timeline

I want to delve into the idea of expanding or enriching your sphere of influence.  In the past you might have heard someone say, “It’s all about the numbers”, or maybe “It’s not about the numbers it’s the quality of the relationships”.  Ok, so who’s right? (hint: I’m not going to answer that)  I will be the first to say there’s a lot of grey area in between.  The correct answer for you may very well be somewhere in the middle.

In Facebook, you have to start somewhere so let’s start with your Profile and in particular, the Timeline.  Facebook’s newest feature replaces your Profile with a BIG banner image called a “cover image”.  The wall is replaced by two columns.  Yadda yadda yadda.  There’s a lot of grumbling about the new Timeline as well as plenty of people singing it’s praise.

Enable Timeline

While the new Timeline is coming to everyone eventually, it was first released to the developers back in September.  Shortly after, someone figured out how to get it without being a developer and we had the “Developer Hack”.  Recently, Facebook rolled it out as an option to everyone.  To enable Timeline on your Profile just go to http://www.facebook.com/about/timeline  At the bottom, you’ll see a small button.  Just press that.

enabling timeline

Now you can upload a “Cover” photo.  You’ll want to upload an image that is at least 850 x 315px.  Like a profile picture, you can resize and crop once it’s up.  You’ll still have a profile picture that overlays on top of the lower left.  No longer will you have a long profile picture (the old 180 x 540 max that’s still in use for Pages) instead it’ll be a 130px. square.

timeline-cover-photo

You’ll see a warning that you should not put advertising or commercial crap in the picture.  Please don’t.  Social Media already has enough spam, why add to it?  It’s supposed to be a picture that represents who you are – not what you sell.

Totally unrelated but I hereby nominate this as the BEST cover image of the year…

Best cover image ever

Important: for all those grumbling that they don’t like Timeline and they want their old profiles back, there’s some great virus spam scans out there that purport to allow you to revert.  They are scams and will take over your profile.  Be smarter than that, don’t fall for it.  Too late?  Here’s how to fix it

http://areweconnected.com/facebook/how-to-kill-a-bad-facebook-app/

Tweet this, Share this, or Linkedin this.

Mike Mueller

Mike builds the custom Apps that create the Tabs that make Custom Facebook Pages special. He builds Discount WordPress Blogs and shoots commercial high def video. He's an avid hockey fan, rides a motorcycle (a really fast one), loves strong beer and good red wine.
Twitter   Facebook   LinkedIn   Blog      Flickr   Trulia   YouTube   Foursquare   Email

Website - Twitter - Facebook - More Posts