Facebook has been a boon for business owners and entrepreneurs wanting to promote their products or services. It is the most popular social media channel in the world and gives businesses the opportunity to reach a wide, global audience.

Recently, Facebook made a major change to the design of its profiles, including business pages, with its new "timeline" based design. Let’s take a look at some of the major changes and discuss how you can use them to your best advantage.

How to make the most of the Facebook timeline format

We can complain and grumble all we want, but the fact of the matter is, the new design is here and it’s not an option. So let’s take a look at some of the positives of the Facebook changes and see how you can make the most of them.

• Pimp out your cover photo: While it’s a challenge (and perhaps source of frustration?) that you can’t deliver marketing type messages in your cover photo, it is a much wider, larger content area to work with than you had previously on your page. It’s the chance to get creative and create an attention-grabbing, visually impressive representation of your business. See this as an opportunity to let your business shine unique.

• Highlight your content: For everything that you post on your page, there are new options for how you display the content. You can star a post, which will highlight it and make it a large image that goes across the whole length of the page. You can also pin posts to the top, ideal for focusing on very important information, such as your latest promotion or newest blog post.

• Showcase accomplishments: Milestones are yet another new feature, allowing you to tell your customers about your business’ recent accomplishments, product releases and rewards, including the mention of date, location and time. You can also add an image related to the milestone.

• Use photos: They really pop with the new design, so start adding them to your Facebook content. Post photos of your products or people using them. Ask your customers to post photos related to your business. Or find fun graphics, images, cartoons… anything that relates to your business somehow.

• Encourage your customers to check-in: The new design brings location based check-ins right to your timeline. A check-in acts as a virtual recommendation for your business and helps to give you more exposure.

• Keep conversations private: The message option is a new feature that allows you to receive and send messages (as you do on your personal profile) for more private communications – perfect for customer service issues for example.

See, it’s not all bad! The timeline has drastically changed the visual layout and functionality of Facebook pages and with that has created new challenges for business owners. But there are new opportunities as well. Time to get creative in how you use your page and take advantage of all the new features at your fingertips.