Unlike Google+ which had - and still does - a long runway before companies must to decide how much they would commit themselves to it, the implications of what Facebook is introducing via its TimeLine as well as other products are clear and immediate for brands: the strategies and page admin processes around corporate Pages have to be rethought - and pronto. The reason is simply Facebook's massive reach.

There is no shortage of statistics illustrating how deeply embedded Facebook has become. The most recent comes from comScore which ranked Facebook as the top global social network by a wide margin. In June 2011, 734.2 million people visited Facebook.com globally, an increase of 33% from the previous year.

Facebook also dominates other top US web brands in terms of average monthly time spent per user, according to data from The Nielsen Company. In July 2011, the average Facebook user spent five hours, 18 minutes and 40 seconds on the site.

In comparison, the brand with the second-highest average time per user in July, AOL Media Network, only averaged two hours, 17 minutes and 46 seconds, less than half Facebook’s total.

Rethinking Pages

The products Facebook rolled out last week, Graph Rank, Ticker and Timeline, will inevitably become available for Pages in the near future, Overdrive Interactive writes. This represents a positive for companies, it said: “Once Pages are infused with the Timeline, businesses will be able to tell their complete story, from the beginning, to highlights they have had, to what they are doing right now.“ It also will highlight negative events as well, the site warned.

More than ever before page administrators will need to be hyper sensitive to what content shows up in new-third party apps.