Can You Use a Milestone on a Facebook Page?

For a long time, Facebook has been adding minor improvements and little features to both personal profiles and business pages. One such feature was the introduction of milestones. For personal profiles, these tend to be major life events. A milestone might be a date of birth, a registration for Facebook, a marriage, a child’s birth or another such event.

For a business page, milestones are very flexible. You can add one for almost anything. One great example is Facebook’s own Facebook profile. Just click here and view the date timeline on the right. Click the lowest date, 2005, and see what milestones have been added. You’ll see things like

• High School Students Join Facebook – September 2, 2005
• Facebook Opens for Everyone – September 26, 2006

Some businesses add dozens of milestones, particularly if they have long and storied histories. Others limit themselves to the basics; founding date, particularly.

A milestone is essentially a special type of page post that stretches across the news feed and sits under a special flag icon. It shows the title, the date and an attached image if you have an image to attach. For example, Coca-Cola has a “founded” milestone with a scan of an old piece of company stock.

Tips for Milestones

When you’re creating a milestone, you have two basic categories; current milestones and old milestones. Adding an old milestone would be adding something like your company’s foundation date, or a grand opening, or the opening of your first international branch. These are older events, but you want them chronicled on Facebook. A current milestone would be something happening today. The events are the same, but the dates are more important.

Before you add milestones, consider the oldest possible milestone to add. This will typically be the date your company was founded. You need to add this milestone first, otherwise trying to add older milestones later won’t work. For example, if your company was founded in 1990, and you add a “opened second branch” milestone in 1995, you won’t be able to go back and add the “founded in 1990” milestone. More on adding old milestones later.

Adding a Milestone

On your page’s administration account, look above your news feed, above the box where you typically create a new post. One of the options, often overlooked, is the “Event, Milestone +” option. Clicking this will bring down a drop-down menu of the options, particularly event and milestone. Click milestone.

This brings up a dialogue box with your various options. You can specify a title, which becomes the bold headline in the post. You used to be limited to specific verbs related to businesses, such as “founded” or “opened,” but this is no longer the case.

You can specify a location, which allows you to specify a physical location if you have one for your business.

You will be asked to select a date. Unless you perform certain optional steps in other parts of your page, you will be limited to the date you opened your Facebook page as the earliest you can post. Choose year, month and day, as desired.

You can also write a “Story” here, which will be the text of your post. For older events, you don’t need to pay much attention to this, unless you’re trying to draw attention to your older milestones. For current events, you should include something attention-grabbing to make the milestone post the hub for discussion.

You can choose to upload a photo or add a photo you’ve already uploaded, as well. Use all the typical rules of Facebook photos, including the 20% text limitation and the usual resolution and text concerns. For older events, of course, you have much more leeway. The aforementioned bill of stock from Coke very much breaks the 20% text rule, but it’s a perfectly acceptable photo.

Finally, you have a tick box that allows you to hide the post from your news feed. If this is left unchecked, the milestone will be broadcast the same way any normal page post is broadcast. If you check the box, the post will remain unnoticed, though not unpublished. This allows you to add a bunch of historical milestones all at once without worrying about spamming your users.

Posting Old Milestones

Twice now I’ve glossed over what’s necessary to post milestones older than the creation date of your Facebook page. If this is what you want to do, here’s how to do it.

First, click the “about” section below your cover photo and like box. This will take you to the page info editing area. Make sure the “page info” section in the left sidebar is clicked, if it’s not by default.

Second, in the “Start info” box under page info, click the link provided. If you haven’t specified a start date before, this will be more or less blank.

You will have to select one of the fixed number of start types. These are: Founded, Born, Started, Opened, Created and Launched. Pick the appropriate type for your business.

Next, add the year, month and day that apply to the start date. You can pick a year as far back as the year 1000, though chances are your business has not been running for 1,015 years. If you’re the exception to this, congratulations on being so forward-thinking as to be using Facebook in the first place!

Once you have specified this start date milestone, you’ll be able to add other milestones at any date between that date and present day. As of now, there’s no way to add a date in the future, so your future history milestones will need to be added as they occur.

Types of Milestones to Add

So, what sort of events might you want to add as milestones? Here are a few ideas.

• Businesses that have physical locations could add milestones for each time a new branch or franchise has been opened, or each time your offices have moved.
• Businesses that sell physical products can add milestones for each time a new product is launched, or major products if your catalog is excessive.
• Businesses providing a service and add milestones for each additional service or expansion of services.
• Any time your business earns an award, you can add a milestone for that award.
• You can add milestones for reaching certain numbers of fans, even making a game out of it.

Consider posting milestones slowly, with advertisement, to foster discussion of your history. You might piggyback on the Internet trend of Throwback Thursday to post a new milestone each week.