Facebook timelines are mandatory as of March 30th, page owners need to prepare for the big change. Default landing pages no longer exist and page’s will have to find new creative ways to gain and keep fans.

There are a great many changes and, whether or not you like them, they are very likely here to stay – at least for a while.

Facebook’s stats are reiterated time and again. But they are for a reason. Facebook’s 850 million users are active users, 483 million of them use Facebook daily and 425 million are on Facebook through their mobiles – they carry Facebook in their pockets, purses and everywhere they go. Facebook also supports 70 different languages and is quite literally all over the world. These stats continue to grow by the month and Facebook has said they’re aiming for 900 million by the end of 2012 – but many think it’ll be closer to the Billion mark.

Facebook also accounts for 95% of time spent on social networks. This means that, of the total time people are spending on social media sites on the Net, Facebook is eating up 95% of that time. Unlike sites like Twitter where people leave quick tweets, Facebook has a huge “stickiness factor” where users are not just checking in and out, they are sticking around, looking for updates, and finding people, pages, groups, games, and more – they are interacting.

Facebook first rolled out the new Timelines feature for personal profiles a few months back but people were also given the choice to opt-out of using the new feature. As of February 29th, Facebook began testing this new layout with (business) pages, and come March 30th, all Facebook pages will automatically change over to the new Timeline layout. Facebook has given every page owner a month’s grace to test, learn, and edit their new page’s look before they are published permanently in the Timelines layout – and seen by all their fans and users alike.

To get a better overview of all changes, download our Timeline for Facebook Fan Pages PDF here.