Today, Facebook is announcing Timeline for Business Pages. Business pages will look prettier with the big cover photo. The posts will be displayed in the new Timeline format.

So what?

This is exciting for designers, maybe, but not for people who want bottom-line social media marketing results.

Explain to me how the new look will improve your business results in any way?

Less than 1% of fans go to back to Facebook pages after they’ve like them.

This knowledge has been out there for 9 months. See the 7 Biggest Fan Page Marketing Mistakes. Facebook is not another website for your business – it’s more like an email list, because fans usually consume your page’s posts from their homepage, not from the business page itself. If you have fans, and you want to reach them, then you post on your page, but they see it on their Facebook homepage (in their newsfeed).

Fans don’t come back to your beautiful Timeline Page.

So by all means, make your business’s page look good with the new layout, and feature a post at the top of the page, but don’t expect a lot of your fans to be looking at the actual page. Facebook doesn’t work that way. Your brand’s Timeline needs to look good, but 40-160 times as many people will see your posts in their newsfeeds, not on your Timeline page.

Get back to work.

The real work is getting fans to SEE your posts, which happens if they like and comment on your posts. If you aren’t working hard on making your posts more interesting and getting more likes and comments, but instead, you’re anticipating how cool the Timeline will make the page look, you’re on the wrong track.

Stop trying to look cool and start looking for opportunities to get results.

What’s frustrating for me is that so many people get excited about things like the new Timeline for Pages. “Wow it’s going to look cool!” Really? You’re in the business of looking cool? I mean yes, that’s cool, but do you really think that the look of the old business page is why you haven’t taken your social media marketing results to the next level? Get real.

I think Facebook only created the new Timeline for brands because brands started asking for it as soon as the user pages on Facebook looked better than the business pages. It was strange, really- they hadn’t mentioned doing it for business pages, but people assumed they would. And a Facebook exec said they were just “thinking about it.”

What you should be paying attention to instead

Meantime, there have been several opportunities brands could use on Facebook to get more traffic, interaction and sales:

• The new actions - create your brand’s own “like”, leverage the social graph and go viral- e.g. Nike’s FuelBand
• videos in sponsored posts - get 100,000+ people to see your video for pennies
• Infinigraph viral content insights - find out what content in your niche is most viral and interactive, and what times and days are best for your page to post
• campalyst post ROI tracking – hook together your Facebook page and Google analytics to track the profitability of each post.
• Facebook ads. Everyone in Facebook marketing still isn’t using Facebook ads or getting better at using them, they’re the most powerful and affordable type of online ad, and they’ve been around for years.

If you think the new Timeline for Pages is more exciting then these, they you aren’t really interested in business results, or you don’t understand how Facebook works, or your only strategic goal is to make your company look cool. Which is it for you?

I’m a Facebook expert, social media speaker and Internet marketing strategy consultant. I also conduct SEO audits.

Let me know if you want help!