8M Facebook Pages switch to Timeline in first week

Brands are wasting no time switching over to Facebook’s new Timeline Page design. Just one week after the social network rolled out the radical facelift, more than 8 million Pages have already made the transition.

Timeline is the Facebook profile re-imagined in storybook form. Facebook rolled out its new take on the personal profile to all users in Decemeber. Last Tuesday at its first marketing conference, Facebook also gave Page owners — the company’s brand, business, and celebrity audience — the ability to switch over to Timeline-infused profiles to better convey stories to fans.

More than one million Facebook Pages are making the switch to the new Timeline design each day, a Facebook spokesperson told VentureBeat.

“[Timeline] wasn’t ever meant to be just about people, just for humans,” Facebook Timeline product manager Sam Lessin said last week when showing off the design to reporters. “It’s a phase shift for the company overall and how we think about identity … We always start with people. We’re Facebook, that’s kind of what we do … and then we do it for other types of organizations that also have a story and want to be able to tell it.”

Brands big and small, including Ben & Jerry’s, Starbucks, Lexus, and Ford, have all embraced Timeline to express their individual brand identities in new ways that will ideally resonate with fans and customers on a deeper, more emotional level. And, at least according to Facebook, the layout, in conjunction with Facebook’s new advertising products, is appealing to Facebookers.

Ben & Jerry’s, which used Facebook’s new Reach Generator feature to target fans, quadrupled its normal reach to 98 percent of all fans during a 28-day period and witnessed double the engagement during the same period, a Facebook spokesperson said.