The new Facebook timeline

From 30 March, all the public pages of Facebook, as well as personal pages, go to the new configuration "Timeline ". The directors of the pages had about a month's time to learn how to use the new features, but above all to develop the new graphics and take advantage of the new tools that the platform provides. As always, the changes bring with them advantages and difficulties, which we see and how we have addressed to the official page of the Senate.

The old display board

The new "diary" radically changes the look of your Facebook page. Instead of the usual bulletin board, on which the news kept coming and disappeared with the stratification of the new post, the diary remains navigable all the time.

The sidebar with the page history makes it possible to navigate backwards in time, allowing users to read in the past of the institution. According to the wishes of the developers of Palo Alto, shipping time should facilitate the development of a diachronic narrative, no longer juxtaposed. For pages so this is a challenge: to abandon the use of Facebook as a "megaphone" to announce events, and exploit it to its full potential as a tool for storytelling. As explained on Mashable by Ian Schafer, CEO of Deep Focus, and social media marketing agency, the challenge for brands will be to tell stories, and not just run the updates.

The new diary of The New York Times

Facebook offers, as the start date of the diary, that of the birth of the page on the platform, but for the New York Times, you can manage the time line meant to load on the archive page of the head, from the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Encouraged by the work done some time ago at the Stage of Apothecaries Chiara, which had created on the site of the Senate a full and challenging timeline rich in content, news and curiosity, we decided to make our own the idea of the NYT, setting for Palazzo Madama navigation chronological part of his birth, in 1863.

Disappears, the new management, the ability to create specific landing pages (landing pages) on the Facebook profile. All fans and users adhere on the page of the diary. It therefore becomes important that the appearance of the page is taken care of immediately and send the message key tied to the institution. The new cover, the image at the top of the page, large (845 × 315 pixels), is the first thing that fans and newcomers will see. We have long meditated on what type of image to choose: a significant work of the collections, a picture of the building and its decorations, a picture of our audience. Finally we decided, in line with our practice, to share with users the choice: we created on Facebook a gallery of 13 images significant works of the museum, making decorations and architecture fans vote their favorite image, at the same time we have created a event into a museum , which will be held on the first Tuesday of every month free of charge from April 3 to invite fans to photograph themselves with their favorite work: once a month, one of the photos will become the cover of the fan of our page.

An event zero budget designed to Facebook fans

The idea to create an event to "zero budget" to launch the new timeline was dictated by the contingency of the moment, but also by the desire, pursued for some time, to create events that could put in free life "physics" of the museum with the "virtual" on social. We hope that the response is enthusiastic, we'll find out together in the coming weeks.

Finally, the new tab and goals. The horizontal band just below the cover of the diary is home to the old tab, which now correspond to the applications linked to the page. In addition to the equipment normally used in the page, such as photos, events, places, you can add new ones. The app specifically designed for the pages are still few: for example, you still can not connect to the timeline of the listing application of Pinterest, which integrates the pins in the timeline. For the moment we have solved with an iframe, by creating a static html page, which incorporates our Pinterest profile within the tab (we used the application Woobox ). We hope that developers Italian devote themselves to creating apps specifically designed and created for museums and cultural institutions.

The milestones are the posts that you can emphasize in particular along our time line: particularly important events that we want to keep in the foreground, significant milestones in the history of the museum. With the "always on top", you can then put certain post, chosen by the administrator, always at the top of the page: a chance to keep out events such as exhibitions or events of particular importance.

Expect comments and exchange of ideas, and, of course, your photos with our Analog Thumb.