This is a great follow up to a recent Facebook related blog post, and now that Timeline is public its true potential is shining. What’s so great about it? That big, beautiful, cover photo is fantastic for marketing. I realize it’s only on your personal profile, but in that previous post you agreed that your personal Facebook profile is as powerful, if not more powerful than a fan page.

What’s so awesome about it? It’s a huge (851 x 315 pixels) advertisement for whatever you want. Mine is my personal blog. It’s non-intrusive, fits into the Facebook color scheme and is big, bold and traffic driving. When you use the personal marketing / networking methods I talked about in my previous post and you add some SVAPs (Silicon Valley Awesome Person) as friends they’ll immediately see a link to your website, blog, or whatever and you have yet another chance to impress them.

How should you go about doing this? Just like any advertisement, your ultimate goal is for people to see it, and for it to convert. You want it to be well designed, interesting and have a powerful call to action. The average techie Facebook user has a lot of friends, many more than the site-wide average of 130. Every time one of these people visit your profile and see this advertisement, they just might head over to your company. Maybe it’ll be an investor, or a new corporate client! Heck, I was even wondering if you could sell the spot to a third party advertiser (though I don’t now if this violates Facebook’s terms of service).

Just like anything, don’t forget to track the conversions. Use a custom domain URL tracking software thingy and send people through that. At the very least, get Google Analytics, KISSMetrics, or the like going on the site. You need to know what’s working and what’s not so you can make the appropriate changes.