Over the last few days I have spent time with the team developing new tabs for some of our clients on their Facebook pages. One of these tabs was a welcome tab that a Facebook user would see when they visited the page. So we completed the tabs and our client was happy with the way it looked and gave it their tick of approval. However when we went to add the tabs to the page, we suddenly came across an issue, the tabs were gone!
Many businesses are starting to utilise welcome tabs on their Facebook pages to engage people who come there and encourage them to “like” their page. It can really give the page a professional touch and help grow a Facebook network and fan base.
We also found another issue, it seemed not only were the tabs gone, we weren’t able to set our welcome tab as the default tab to land on instead of the normal wall. After some investigation I found some information online and the official stance from Facebook. They say there are many benefits to the new page layout which include:
- Photos at the top: The most recent photos that you post to the Wall of a Page you administer, or photos you tag your Page in, will appear here.
- Use Facebook as your Page: You will be able to receive notifications for your Page, view a News Feed for your Page, and ‘like’ and post on other Pages as your Page.
- Wall filters: Pages now have two publicly visible Wall filters -”Posts by Page” and “Everyone.” Page admins will be able to view additional filters -”Most Recent” and “Hidden Posts”.
- Email notifications: You can opt to receive notifications when people post or comment on your Page.
- Mutual connections: When people visit your Page, they will be able to view friends who also like your Page, as well as other Pages that both they and your Page like.
- Navigation: The content that you formerly accessed by clicking the tabs at the top of your Page can now be found in the column underneath your Page profile picture. The text in the box that used to appear in the box underneath your Page profile picture will now appear in the Info tab.
- Profile picture size: The profile picture size for Pages has been adjusted from 200×600 to 180×540
Whilst these new features do add a lot to pages on Facebook I believe there are also some downsides including the main one we have recently had with the welcome tab.
This situation made me think though about how much time and effort we can spend catering and developing for such a powerful online platform as Facebook, and the issues it can cause when they make changes to functionality without warning. As much as we couldn’t have been prepared for this change – it highlights to us as a digital agency that we must stay abreast of changes and help others understand them too.
Have you seen the changes to Facebook Pages? What do you think?
About Fred
As a business we invested in a CMS platform for our FB Page which gives us a vast range of functionality, applets etc. Being able to land people directly on this tab was not only a key part of our content strategy, but a key part of the decision to invest long term. Now that investment choice is questionable based on these changes – it will be interesting to see how our CMS partner will response to FBs announcement and implementation of the new Pages.
Just a quick update on this – it seems that if your page has been classified as a Community page by Facebook, the ability to select a default landing tab has been taken away from you. We are in the middle of trying to get them to change it over for one of our clients as we speak.
@Fat Paddler – I have seen a few CMS for Facebook solutions and this was one of my main concerns about investing in such a product. However I would hope that they would be working closely with Facebook to ensure they were not affected.