For SEO professionals who have been grappling with the process of adjusting their companies' Facebook Fan Pages to the new Timeline format, here is some news that will inspire them to keep at it. A recent study was conducted by Simply Measured, a company that creates social media analytics software, on 15 companies that updated their Facebook Fan Pages to Timeline on or very close to February 29th, 2012, which was the date that Facebook made Timeline available to businesses on the social networking site.

As reported in an article by Mashable, the study found that engagement on brand pages rose by approximately 46 percent from the time prior to businesses' adoption of Timeline to after. This is a pretty monumental piece of news to all those other companies out there. Facebook had made promises to businesses that Timeline would provide a greater wealth of advertising potential and opportunities. Now, there is data to back up Facebook's assertion.

When Facebook first rolled out Timeline for Pages over a month ago, it gave businesses a deadline of March 30th to update and tweak their pages to look great in the new format, before forcing them all to change. Now that the big day is fast approaching, this study can only serve as a greater impetus for businesses to switch as soon as they can, when their marketing potential can increase by large percentages.

What may be the reason for this greater engagement on Facebook Timeline? Many are saying that it is due to the enhanced visual elements of the new format. Timeline allows businesses to post images that can take up huge amounts of space on the walls of their Pages. Not only that, they can display a lot of creativity with the cover picture they decide to put up, as well as the small windows of images that appear right below it. There are a variety of other great features as well enhance the visual quality.

All businesses should hurry to update their Facebook Pages quickly before the deadline runs out, and their Pages are forced to change.