Sierra Club’s innovative use of new Facebook Timeline

With the advent of Facebook’s new timeline page format for brands, Sierra Club has posted commemorations of its biggest moments, dating from its founding in 1892. The environmental organization has taken the social media site—an ongoing catalog of the here and now—and has turned it into an archive of its history.

“We go back 120 years,” says Chris Thomas, the organization’s director of digital strategies. “There’s a lot of content, there’s a lot of media that exists over that period. It was sort of an immediate light bulb where we thought, this is something we can really take advantage of.”

Building the timeline

Thomas concedes that when Facebook introduced its timeline for individual pages in January, he didn’t quite get it. Individual users aren’t terribly likely to backfill their timelines with their life stories, he says. But for an organization with a long history of achievement, it’s perhaps the “optimal way” to use Facebook, he says.