No doubt you’ve heard about how the FTC is cracking down on bloggers and online entrepreneurs and making sure they aren’t pulling any shenanigans and stay honest and true about their online business dealings.

Testimonials on your site and earnings disclaimers are only part of what the FTC is watching:  they are also keeping an eye on your blog contests and giveaways on your Facebook page and profile.

I think every single Facebook or blog contest or giveaway I’ve ever participated in, violated at least one, if not all, of the rules.  Just read Facebook’s promotion guidelines and you’ll see what I mean.

Before you do another promotion, giveaway or contest – please do your homework.  You do not want your blog shut down, fine incurred or worse – be sent to jail!  All because you didn’t follow the rules.

Just because everyone else is doing it this way isn’t going to cut it when the FTC comes a callin’.

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:

1. Visit your Facebook page
2. Click the tab you want to link to
3. Copy the URL from the web browser
4. Paste in the copied URL for any Facebook social media icons you have linking to this page
5. (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.

With over 400 million people on Facebook, it is definitely a wise business move to make sure you’re on Facebook. But there is a huge difference between your Facebook personal profile, and a Facebook (fan) page.

Personal Profiles are great for connecting with real-life friends and family; and of course, you could connect with anyone you want, including business associates. However, the down-side to Facebook personal profiles is the 5,000 friend limit.

I recently saw a well known internet marketer announce that they had reached their 5,000 friend limit and was asking everyone to connect with them on the Facebook page, which has no connection limits.

My suggestion is to direct all your business connections to your Facebook page and not your personal profile. Pages are the business side of Facebook, not profiles. The friend connection limitation of profiles can eventually put you, as a business owner/entrepreneur, in a tough spot when you reach your friend limit.

If you’re like me, and many others, all along you have been adding everyone as a ‘friend’ on Facebook, and of course, getting ‘fans’ to your page as well.  However, after seeing many reach that friend limit and then have to turn away ‘friends’; I decided to make some changes in how I use Facebook.

I’ve been going through my friends list on my personal profile and limiting those connections to only those who are literally my family and personal friends.

I have drafted a response that I am sending to any friend requests that are not family or personal friends, asking them to connect with me via my Facebook page.

I am all for connecting and being social online; I follow over 10,000 on Twitter and have at least that many following me in return – so I’m a power connector!

However, Facebook is not Twitter, so therefore how I choose to use Facebook is not the same as how I use Twitter.

Hopefully this advice will help you see the obstacle you may soon face, if your friends list on your personal profile continues to grow and you reach that 5,000 limit threshold. Directing business contacts to your fan page will circumvent the limit.

To YOUR Success,

Traci