I’ve just recently gotten my friend to lock me out of Facebook because, I admit it, I am a Facebook addict and with this crazy slew of end-of-the-term projects, reports, presentations, and finals, I just don’t feel right about wasting time on there anymore. But in the last while, all I’ve seen are status updates about hating the new timeline layout and how much of an inconvenient change it is. Woe is the day that timeline became mandatory but it’s here and I really don’t see what the big deal is. My feeling is that people are just naturally opposed to change and having to get used to a format change is now a huge inconvenience. I didn’t find that my Facebook experience changed all that much. After hearing a lot of negative complaints about it, I thought this article provided a nice change of perspective.

It speaks to how a marketing study by Wildfire found that Timeline is actually a positive change for 95% of Facebook pages as it’s increased the number of Likes to 95% of  pages and fostered more conversation around a specific profile. Some further encouraging news is that local businesses that have Facebook pages are now seeing five times the amount of exposure in news feeds and eight times the number of fans engaging with them in some sort of post. These numbers, however, hold true only for local pages that have 30-100 fans. Comparisons with corporate pages that have more than 100,000 fans are showing that having corporate fans just isn’t as valuable as having local fans – a really important point to take into consideration when deciding what tactic will work best for your particular kind of company.

If I were a local business looking to find an effective way to engage with my potential consumer base…I think I’d be welcoming Timeline with open arms.