I’ve been trying out the new Facebook timeline feature for my profile since before the holiday break. Now that I’ve been using it for a few weeks now, there are things I like about it and things I don’t. I like the header design, and the fact that you can get a lot of information about a persion in a quick glance. Below the fold, so to speak, it goes a bit pear-shaped. It’s tough, when scrolling quickly, so see what’s newly posted and what’s older.

Some items are pinned to a center line with a dot, signifying their timing, but other boxes seem to float, such as the friends box and other information, such as recent tracks I’ve played in Spotify.

Anyways, as you can see above, one of the key parts of the Facebook timeline profile is the header graphic, which is something you can select. I must have gone through a dozen photos until I found the right one. In the end, I ended up tweaking it quite a bit in Photoshop to get it to fit just right. My photo is one I took when I was in Cardiff, Wales in 2009.

I would guess that in the next few months, as these become more prevalent across Facebook, we’ll see them start to roll out to fan pages as well. I’m not sure how the timeline will work for brands, as I think some of the display of information on these pages can get a bit confusing.

Despite that, when the time comes I thought we’d all want to customize that header for our brands/colleges/universities/whatever, so I created a Photoshop document template all set up and ready for you to design with. I laid out the “notch” where your profile picture is inserted by Facebook so you can make sure text or other graphical elements that are important aren’t being covered up.

Here’s a ZIP file.

If you’d also like, here’s a torrent version.

When posting a new item, link, etc to your fan page, click on the lock icon that says public and choose custom.

Next, you’ll see a dialog box asking you if you’d like to target by a specific location or language. I haven’t experiemented with language, but that’s something to put in the back pocket and maybe do some language specific updates in the future.

To geo-target your update, first select the country you want to target, then you can select everywhere (hello, Wales!), a state (Hello, Florida!) or a particular city (hello, Cleveland!). It looks like this:

Now, people in Pittsburgh (go, Penguins!) won’t see updates about events or info geared towards our Cleveland fans.

Here’s what it looks like if you’re an admin on the page, you can hover over the lock symbol to see what area you targeted it to.

Basically, they are narrowing the width of these tabs from 760 pixels down to 520 pixels. If you have created custom FBML tabs, you’ll need to login in as soon as possible and either resize or redesign your tab content to make sure it fits correctly in the new sizes.

Here’s a visualization of the difference:

Click for a full size image to really see the difference

This is quite a reduction in size – especially if you’ve created custom layouts or other images for those tabs. Facebook is explaining the change this way:

These updates are designed to simplify navigation for users, reduce complexity for developers, and enable us to build the next generation of tools for growing your business with Facebook.

Said another way: we need the room for ads. That’s my take.

The other change: the “Boxes” tab, boxes on profiles and Pages, and application info sections will be going away. I don’t know if many schools were using these features on their fan pages, but be aware those are going away as well.

Additional Information:

InsideFacebook’s post
Mashable
NorthBlog

This week, Facebook changed their fan pages to, um, like pages. Is that how we’re going to say that? It’s weird. Anyways, now you can say you “like” things instead of being a “fan” of them, including our higher ed institutions.

One other social feature they’ve rolled out is the Like Button, a little widget you can put on any web page and allow your site visitors to interact and say they like it. This action will appear on their news feeds and profile pages, and spread the word about content they find interesting around the web.

What’s interesting to me is the fact that this is much easier for users than using any of the various “share this” type actions, that opens in a new window. Now, it just takes users one click to share that content.

Here’s what it looks like in action. I’ve added a new Like Button to my blog. It looks like this:

It’s blue because I’ve clicked on it already, but as you can see, you will also see if any of your friends have clicked on an item. On your wall in Facebook, the following appears in your activity stream:

It’s an interesting new way to share content – it’s almost like these are little bite-sized interactions, ones that I think will definitely appeal to the more casual user. We hardcore users have been using regular share forever, right?

Here’s how to add it to your site. You can use Facebook’s Like widget builder to set some features up and it will give you either a bit of iframe code or XFBML that you can integrate into your site.

The challenge is that this widget only allows you to create a Like Widget for one page. If you are using PHP or WordPress, Andreas Jacob has come up with an easy way to dynamically have this widget get the current page URL. It’s really a simple bit of code to replace.

If you’re using WordPress, replace the URL string in the code Facebook gives you with this:

[…]like.php?href=<?php echo urlencode(get_permalink($post->ID)); ?>

Regular PHP can be done this way. You have to do a quick URL build first, hence the two lines.

<?php $url = “http” . ((!empty($_SERVER['HTTPS'])) ? “s” : “”) . “://”.$_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'].$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']; ?>

Once you have the current URL in a variable, edit your Facebook code, replacing the URL string just as you did above with this:


[…]like.php?href=<?php echo urlencode($url); ?>


I’m sure it would easy to get the current page URL from ASP, Ruby or any CMS platform. Try it out and let me know what you find.

One more thing…why not try it out by liking this post right below this paragraph? Thanks in advance.

Our current and prospective students are as well. They’re chronicling their lives and being social, which is the whole point of web 2.0, right?

One area where I think we aren’t doing as good a job is educating people about how things they post are often visible to everyone and thanks to Google, last forever.

Here’s a quick anecdote I read about this morning.

I live in a rural area of northwestern Pennsylvania. The highlight of every summer is our big county fair. Big name acts perform, animals are displayed, and a good time is had by all. This year, the fair put on a beauty pageant and they crowned their first fair queen Sunday night.

By Monday afternoon, she suddenly and without warning resigned and gave up her crown. Everyone was perplexed – until it was learned an anonymous person sent photos found on, I’m assuming, Facebook, to the local newspaper as well as pageant and fair organizers.

Here’s a quick bit from the Meadville Tribune:

The pictures include two males attempting to bite the clothed chest of a girl who appears to be Kantz. Other photos depict a woman who appears to be Kantz with a young man; some photos seem to indicate a party setting. In one picture the man is gesturing obscenely toward the camera; in another the woman is biting the extended middle finger of a male. Three other photos depict a young woman who appears to be Kantz with others while she holds an unidentifiable drink in her hand.

My question is this: who is responsible for teaching teenagers and college students about how to use these web 2.0 tools responsibly?

Is it high schools? Colleges and universities? Parents? The sites themselves? Everywhere younger people look they’re being asked to share their photos, videos, songs, blogs and more but we aren’t telling them how to do it safely.

Do you include any training in your incoming student / orientation program about these kinds of topics? I wonder how we can best educate our students – not only for their safely and well-being but also as new rules are being set out for groups of students like athletes.

It’s a great question, and there are quite a few ways to tell people about your fan page. You could advertise it on your site, or print up cards with your fan page URL, but I’ve found a great way to show people is with Facebook’s relatively new Fan box. It’s a little snippet of code you embed on your site to let people know you are on Facebook and they can easily become a fan of your school. Here’s a box for my college – feel free to be a fan:

There are several options you can choose – including posting your stream as well as your fans. You can leave both off, but I think seeing people’s names and icons really draws people in. I placed one of these boxes on our college’s intranet page and I’ve seen a steady stream of new fans. I think when our students get back in a few weeks, we’ll really see that number jump up.

As an experiment to see if it really did get people to join, I placed a similar box on another website I run, ErieBlogs.com. I made a fan page for it a year ago and it seemed to stay pretty steady about about 60 fans. I never promoted it really, so that was pretty decent. I placed the Fan box front and center on the site and within a week, over 40 people became a fan. Check out this graph:

Not too shabby for having spent all of about 2 minutes on the entire project.

Try out a fan box today!

Brian Kelly, who runs UK Web Focus, asked me to blog about how we’re using technologies like Facebook here in the US when it comes to how we market our colleges. You can read my post here.

I hope to learn more about how schools in the UK and Europe use technologies at the Institutional Web Management conference coming up at the end of this month, where I’ll be presenting (though I’m presenting on the cloud and not social media.)

Since I led a webinar this week about Twitter and Facebook usage this week for HigherEdHero, I’ve received a lot of questions from folks wanting to know how we added a custom tab to my institution’s fan page. I thought it’d be a worthwhile blog post to show you how we did it, and to see if there are easier ways to accomplish what we have.

We have a “Welcome” tab on our page with some general campus information. It looks like this:

Here’s how to add a similar tab to your institution’s fan page. Keep in mind you must be an administrator of the page you want to add the tab to.

First, search for the FBML app. You can just enter in FBML in the search box on any page.

You’ll want the application called Static FBML. It will look like this. You can click for a larger size image.

Visit the application’s page, which looks like this. You’ll want to say “Add to my Page.”

When you add it to your page, you can choose what pages or applications you want to add the FBML to. You can add it to multiple pages, but be aware that you can only have 1 FBML application on a page, unfortunatly.

At this point, begin editing your page. Find the FBML area and click on the pencil icon to start editing it.

You’ll be given an area where you can title your box as well as edit the content. In box title, enter what you want the text of your tab to say. Don’t worry if you don’t know FBML, you don’t need to. You can put straight up HTML in here, complete with images and more.

Once you’ve got your content in the box (and don’t worry, you can always edit or add more later), it’s time to add it to your page. Go back to your fan page and click on the plus sign (+), which should be the last tab in the row, like such:

When you click the plus sign, you should see all the applications and content you can add as a tab. One of the choices should be the box name you entered when editing the FBML box. Click on it and it will be added to your page.

Click on the tab and if everything’s gone correctly, you should see the HTML content you entered in. Here’s what I see using the HTML I entered a few screens ago.

There you go – you should now have a brand new tab on your fan page you can add all sorts of neat content to. As I said earlier, as far as I know, you can only have 1 FBML app on a page at a time, thus just one custom tab. If you know a better way to accomplish this, please let me know.

Please see the comment from Mark below on how to have more then 1 FBML tab on a page

Here are some details from Higher Ed Hero:

University facebook pages provide many opportunities to expand your communication efforts with current & prospective students-and those beyond your campus network. What are the specific tools & applications you need to use to create or enhance your university’s facebook page? Join us for a live, 60-minute audio conference where you and your colleagues will learn:

Specific Strategies to Create a Facebook Page that Meets Your Needs

Networking on Facebook: How to Best Connect with Students

Facebook Applications that Promote a Strong Image for Your University

Marketing & Communication Opportunities You Need to Know

The audio conference is 1 hour, and I think I could probably talk for 4 or 5 on all these things, but I will do my best to make it informative and educational.

You can learn more and register here.

For those of us who do manage our institution fan pages on Facebook, I noticed a new feature yesterday when I wanted to send an update to our “fans.” I see that you can now target those updates to a specific demographic. Here’s a screencap of the menu:

I think this opens up a whole bunch of new opportunities for us – we can now target alumni specifically or current students. You can also just target a specific geographical area. Very interesting.