CLEVELAND - If you haven’t switched your Facebook page to the new Timeline feature, you'll be forced to do so soon. So, I decided to act now to help you with the changes.
Facebook Timeline 101
1. Stop procrastinating. Find seven days in the next few weeks where you can focus on Timeline. Wouldn’t you like to determine when you make the switch, rather than letting Facebook decide? What if you are swamped when Facebook decides to start your seven day window? Stop delaying. Carve out seven days now so you’re sure to get that Timeline looking the way you want others to see it.
2. Click here to activate Timeline on your own
3. Instantly, Facebook converts your profile into a Timeline. Remember, it will only be visible to you for the first seven days, unless you hit “Publish Now.” During the trial, you can add or hide anything you want.
4. First, I added a cover. This is the picture you want profiled. Pick a good one, because it’s large. I originally had a vertical photo, but the cover space is more wide than tall so I think a horizontal photo works best. You can tweak the picture a little, but not enough, in my opinion, for a vertical photo.
Uploading a new photo takes some time, so be patient. You want your cover photo to be different than your profile picture as that will appear in a box to the lower left of the cover photo.
5. Now, it’s time to review your posts on your Facebook Timeline. Hover over a story or post and click the star icon to feature an item and make it widescreen. When you do this, it disrupts the flow a bit but experiment and see if you like it. It’s easy to minimize if you don’t (you click the same thing to showcase it). The pencil icon will allow you to hide or delete a post.
6. Facebook decides which posts will be part of your Timeline and which ones will be hidden. When there is a post along your Timeline, there is a dot. Look closely. Some of these dots are not associated with any posts because the dot represents a hidden post. When you notice this, hover over the dot and you can see what the post says that’s hiding. While hovering, you can decide if you want to feature it or add it to your Timeline.
7. Go to the upper right corner just under the cover photo and click on the Activity Log . It’s a way to manage everything you share on Facebook and it’s private. Only you see the log. Here, you can control what hits your Timeline and who sees it.
It’s much more obvious who is seeing your posts with this activity log. I recently discovered on the old Facebook profile that even if your page is private, people can see your wall posts that you made on other people’s pages and are thus subject to their privacy policies. Now, with the activity log, it’s easy to control which posts are public and who actually sees them. For example, a wall post about a friend’s birthday showed me that all his friends can see that. It might not seem like a big deal for a birthday, but on a more sensitive post, be careful if you want to keep certain aspects of your life private. Having a private profile doesn’t mean everything is private. The activity log really makes this easy to follow.
An open circle on the activity log means it’s allowed on your timeline and a circle with a line through it means it’s hidden. For more about the activity log, I highly recommend you read the Facebook explainer for more tips and tricks.
8. Map your pictures. You’ll notice the map just below your cover photo. Click on it and you’ll be taken to a large screen of a map with pictures above it. I was amazed at how many are already mapped. Things you think Facebook doesn’t know about you but really does because someone checked you into a place or previously tagged the location of a photo.
When you try to add the location of some photos, Facebook doesn’t always know where that location really is. For example, I took a girls trip to Belize recently, and Facebook mapped it in Houston, Texas.
It had one picture mapped correctly in Belize, but another friend tagged it with the name of the place we stayed. If you go generic and just do the city like Placencia, Belize, it may not show up in the right place, especially if it’s a different country.
It’s an interesting feature, but I think it tells a little too much about you. I think I’ll proceed with caution. I don’t mind telling people where I’ve been, but not where I am. It’s clearly a way for Facebook to get more users to use the Places feature so it might be hard to control if friends tag you as being at that place while you’re still there. For me, it’s sort of like Foursquare, especially since any changes to your map are added to your News Feed. I understand social media is meant to be social and allow you to gather in places outside the Internet, but this is a little bit too much information if used and broadcast while you’re visiting that “Place.”
Overall impression
Overall, Timeline is not as intimidating as you might think. It just takes some time to go through your posts and make
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