Update: Facebook relented and restored the custom landing tab option for pages. Hopefully it will remain.
Facebook changes their policies more often then most folks change their socks! 
Apparently, earlier this week, Facebook removed the ability to easily select a custom landing tab for new visitors to your Facebook page; unless you have at least 10 thousand fans/likes for your page! Then if you’re a super Facebook fan page connector with at least 10 thousand fans, you then will have ability to select a custom landing tab.
This is huge! Why?
Because many who use Facebook for business, have setup custom FBML landing tabs (aka: Welcome tabs) for new site visitors to land on, asking them to become fan, errr…. ‘like’ their page. It’s a way of an initial welcoming introduction to someone who hasn’t visited your page before, or who is not yet ‘liked’ your page.
While keeping up with Facebook and their policy changes could easily be a full-time job… and re-designing landing tabs for every wording change, page width change, etc… is definitely a full-time job (at least for me); the good news is that not all is lost.
Link to the Tab
Each tab you create in Facebook has it’s own unique URL that you can link to. [mouse-over this text to see the URL to my Genesis Blogging Welcome tab] So my suggestion is to link any social media icons on your blog or web site to the specific custom landing tab you may have setup.
Here’s how to find this direct URL:
- Visit your Facebook page
- Click the tab you want to link to
- Copy the URL from the web browser
- Paste in the copied URL for any Facebook social media icons you have linking to this page
- (optional) You can shorten this URL and make it ‘pretty’ by using bit.ly, budurl.com or a similar URL shortening service; OR, by setting up a 301 redirect using .htaccess (for the advanced techy folks)
Hopefully this helped you find a solution to this new Facebook custom landing tab policy.
To YOUR Success,
Traci Knoppe
P.S. Do you use Facebook pages for your business? Do you have 10,000 fans/likes on your page and see the ability to select the custom tab? Someone in a Facebook chat last nite did have way more than 10,000 fans/likes and still could not see this option.
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It seems like they are doing everything they can to get people and businesses to DUMP Facebook! So frustrating!
.-= Real Life Sarah´s last blog ..GET REAL on MomTV: Competition Among Women =-.
I agree Sarah – very annoying. I’m not a huge Facebook fan anyway, but with 400+ million people on Facebook, it’s hard to ignore it completely.
I prefer to use Facebook, Twitter, etc… as a networking tool with the ultimate goal to drive folks back to my blogs/web sites.
If we focus only on these social networking tools as the sole foundation of our business models/marketing, then if they fold and close down, we’ll be in deep trouble.
So don’t put all your social network marketing in one basket.
Thanks for sharing this information Traci. I admit I’ve been kind of procrastinating in making a fan page… I guess it’s because I hear so may other bloggers getting frustrated with Facebook fan pages that I’m avoiding the stress. I’ll get to it one day – by then they will probably have changed their policy again- LOL
Blessings,
Eren
.-= Eren Mckay´s last blog ..Christian Poem for Mother’s Day =-.
I use twitter more than Facebook…It’s true facebook is annoying..Twitter is more easier and i get more traffic from it..