The much awaited timeline for pages is finally rolled out now. Pretty similar to the timeline for personal profiles, facebook now provides an opportunity to prepare your brand timeline page before a forced mandatory change to timeline which is scheduled on March 30th 2012. Like it or not, all the existing business pages would be upgraded (as they call it, but an annoyance to many) to the awesome timeline (again as they called). So all you can do now is to prepare for this big update and take advantage of facebook timeline for business pages.These, you would miss…Default landing tab – No more!!: This is very much disappointing. It would be heartbreaking to some who had spent hours or days of their precious time in designing the default landing tabs. At first it was though that facebook is taking down FBML tabs but the work around was to use iframe which has much more flexibility. Using iframe was just short lived good news for the facebook marketers because, without default landing tab option available, visitors to your page would hardly notice the custom landing tab that you had created (I still have a work around which I would blog sometime later).The large profile picture – Shrunk to stamp size: The large profile picture was considered as a boon and many of them applied their creativity there. Unfortunately, your old profile picture on the business page is not going to help. The thumbnail is now shrunk to a stamp size.New stuff that ensures you not feel missing the above…Cover Photo – The huge canvas for expressing creativity: Well, that's huge list. First of all, a huge real estate for a cover photo to express your creativity. Guess what, the cover image is larger than most of the header banners used in the websites. That's truly web 2.0. Once you start working with the cover photo, you would forget the old profile picture. Neat arrangement of tabs as squared icons – Where did all the facebook page tabs go along with the custom landing tab that you had already created? If you are wondering about this, you haven't noticed the tabs that care right now converted into square icons. The icons are neatly arranged and certainly has more visibility than the tabs. Timeline to present milestones and achievements – Your business has achieved a milestone? A new product launch? Or a new branch opening? You can separate them from the actual wall posts. Basically that is the events feature that got converted into milestones.Pin wall posts to top – We love this feature and this is the part which has a huge marketing potential. This works based on the concept of featured posts. You can pin (only one) wall post and it displays on top of the profile till you in pin it. We made use of this feature to run a banner ad sort of wall posts. Wall posts and activity in a timeline – It has been a month since Facebook rolled out timeline for personal profiles. So, the timeline presentation will not be strange anymore. You can view (arrange) updates, activities, milestones and wall posts to be displayed in a timeline. Nothing much special about it but if used wisely, you can show the world how your business has evolved. One cool feature is that you can add some information about the origin of the company in the timeline.Here is what we did as a first step towards adapting to timeline for pages:Came up with a creative cover image (top banner) for the new page. The exact timeline cover size is 850×315. We had enough area to play around and apply some creativity. Take a look at the cover image and share your thoughts on that :)Once the cover was done, the next step was a cleanup. There were several wall updates which looked awkward in the timeline. We just removed them! There were some unwanted apps and tabs added as well. As the tabs are displayed as square icons, we had to shuffle them to make it perfect. We removed a few unnecessary tabs too Next, to make use of the post pin options, we created a banner ad for one of our top selling service and made that as a wall post. The post is now pinned to the top of the profile. This certainly looks like a conversational banner Finally, moved down to the timeline to the period when the business was "founded" (2002) and added a snapshot of the business website of 2002.These are the things you would have to do for a start. It is basically a cleanup and applying some creativity. There is some good news that I wanted to share. You don't have to entirely scrap the existing custom landing tab that you had created. I am testing a possible promotion with that and would blog about it very soon. So that's about the timeline for business pages for now! Start working on your page already as you have limited time. As soon as you visit your existing page, you would be able to see this update which takes you to a preview where you can edit your pages and make the changes. Once done hit publish and your new business page is ready.See our page and comment your thoughts on the design!