As it seems just about everybody is on Facebook these days – and I don’t just mean for business purposes – it’s likely that commercial real estate professionals and the curious alike have heard about the new Facebook timeline format. Whether you’ve adopted this design for your personal profile (because, admit it, you have on) or have simply seen how friends use the new layout, it’s safe to say that the change to the familiar setup was a bit of a surprise. Suddenly, the opportunity to add “life events” to a real-time, chronological documentation of your virtual existence presented itself. (Cheers, Facebook.) Unless you delete them, pesky photographs, misguided status updates and those posts from an ex will pop up. People still have the option to avoid this until it becomes “mandatory,” according to the official Facebook blog – a process which will roll out “over the next few weeks,” said a post dated January 24th.

Now, from March 30, 2012 onwards, all business pages on Facebook will be switched to this timeline format. To bring the focus back to commercial real estate and the hotel industry in particular, a recent press release from Pipeline Social Media Solutions considered the ways hotels can use Facebook timelines to their advantage. Among other things, the piece highlighted the ease with which administrators could display hotel property or amenity images along the top of the page. Further, Pipeline says that the layout will be more advertising friendly (now some CRE ears are perking up). For instance, call-to-action ads on Facebook can be included in the smaller profile picture set to the left of the cover image, the photo album cover, and icon photo of your apps. This allows hotels – and other companies – to maximize their ad potential through Facebook in a different way.

Page owners will also be able to receive and send messages from page fans – something that is not currently possible. From a hotel customer service perspective, this allows guests, to directly contact PR or social media management teams. For networking across the board, the feature may enable clients to directly reach out to companies, or journalists to request interviews.