Facebook have announced that the Timeline feature will be rolled out to brand pages on March 30th 2012.

Page administrators can opt to display the new layout on their pages from today (February 29th) but as of March 30th, this will be displayed automatically.

Many users will be familiar with this layout as it has now been rolled out to the majority of users’ personal profile pages. As with personal pages, brands can upload a cover photo to appear at the top of their page. You can also customise up to 12 boxes at the top of the page with different apps and the order in which they appear (although photos is fixed as the first box) – the default for this will be to show your photos and page likes.

Hovering over events that appear on your timeline will present you with a star and a pencil. The star will allow you to highlight the update and make it wider, while the pencil allows you to delete the item or pin it to the top of your page.

The page admin panel is now accessible from the top of the page. This will provide you with a summary of recent activity on your page as well as the ability to edit your page and to share your page with your friends.

We would love to hear your thoughts on these changes!

In what is being seen as a bid to take on Twitter more fiercely, Facebook has now added the ability to ‘subscribe’ to individual users and pages. As with Twitter, you do not need to know someone to subscribe to them and they do not have to approve you to allow you to see their updates.

When subscribing to a profile, you can select what kind of updates you want to subscribe to, however, the profile has to mark their update as public in order for you to be able to see it. This is in line with the recent updates to the privacy settings that Facebook recently added whereby you can select whether to share your updates and photos with friends or make them public, and also whether to add a location as shown below:

You can also subsribe to the updates of people that you are already friends with, meaning that you can limit the updates that you receive from them (for example, you can stop viewing someone’s Farmville update).

To allow people to subscribe to your profile, you will need to turn this option on as it is not currently a default for all users. You can read more about the update or find out how to add the subscribe button to your own profile here.