UPDATE: It appears so many people were vocal about this change that Facebook went back to its old practices… for now. Stay tuned. Info below is still relevant if the change is put back in place.
Facebook landing pages (tab) are a great tool for prompting people to like a page, but a vast number of pages no longer have the luxury of a landing page.
As Facebook continues to evolve they now only allow pages that have been liked by more than 10,000 people or those that have worked with an ad rep have the landing tabs. Basically, you either have to have a massive user base, or must have spent a substantial amount of money with the company.
From the Facebook developer forum,
“We apologize for not messaging this earlier. Facebook recently made a change requiring that Pages be authenticated before enabling the ability to set a landing tab beyond Wall or Info. To be eligible for authentication, a Page must have greater than 10k fans or the Page admin must work with their ads account manager. If you are already working with an account representative, please contact that representative to begin the authentication process. If you do not work with an account representative, you can use this contact form to inquire about working with an account representative.
Also, for advertisers who don’t have a representative or 10k fans, and want to run ads and land users on a specific tab, you can still do so with standard Facebook ads by making their Destination URL as the URL incl. your tab. Unfortunately, this currently will not work with “Fan” ads.”
I’d say this is a significant blow for businesses as people will now simply get dumped onto the wall. Of hand, there are a couple things you can do to help combat this change:
- Change the wall setting to only show posts by you/the brand. Doing so will help control the messages new visitors see. I
don’t love this idea, but it’s a way to help control the initial messaging. - Utilize the page boxes. You could use the top page box (left sidebar) that can be customized to ask people to like your page. Again, this isn’t ideal, but at least it will give you a chance to provide an action item.
I don’t think this change has been fully implemented thus far because I run a page with around 5,000 fans and it still has a landing tab that works. Granted, the account associated with the page has advertised on Facebook, but we’ve never worked with an actual account rep.
Hopefully Facebook will not continue to evolve in such a way that makes it less and less effective for non mega brands.
