According to Simply Measured the answer is a clear "yes". Their report shows strong Engagement-per-post gains for fifteen of the first-movers since the new feature set launched. Pages like Toyota, Red Bull, Macy's, Ben & Jerry's were amongst the top 10 or so in their limited review that gained anywhere from 38% to 156%. A small number of first-movers did not show gains.
Pinned Posts and Multimedia
I am going to go out on a limb here and suggest that the two most impactful changes within the Timeline feature-set are pinned posts and the design demand for multimedia content. A third, the new ability for sponsored stories to appear in the wall (vs. the sidebar) will likely prove a big winner not just on acquisition but on engagement (people liking, commenting, clicking through to content).
Pinned posts are great. They can keep more valuable content at the top of the page for those who visit. Facebook would like to increase the value of the brand page and the actual "visit." This does a pretty good job. Community Managers can tell when a pinned post is starting to lose steam by the fall off of interactions. Toyota kept their post on the Women in the World Summit sponsorship up for at least 10 days. That might be an easy choice on a corporate page where the CSR and CSR-like efforts of the company are one of the biggest draws (Toyota has model-specific brand pages which is the norm in that category).
Clearly it is no news that pictures and video earn more attention and interaction. It took a "Timeline" design change that just begs for big pictures and embedded videos for brands to put the effort (and resources) behind it.
Social Media Influence summarized the performance of multimedia:
"Examining the figures in more detail, the study shows that, while engagement with status updates is down, Timeline has yielded a 65 percent increase in multimedia engagement (through videos and photos) and overall fan engagement is up by 14 percent."
Timeline was a decent investment by the early-adopters. They had to pay for more images and video. They require expanded storytelling capabilities. Brands hungry to get the largest word of mouth impact (people sharing their content or "Talking about" in Facebook vernacular) will staff their pages with editors/community managers equipped to tell these more visual stories. The Timeline changes are inevitable. That they actually seem to deliver some better levels of engagement when leveraged well, is encouraging. Brands are leaping in right and left and learning the level of investment necessary to make the most of these new features. You can get more here: