Tips and Tutorials

This afternoon Facebook announced via the developer forum that Facebook Pages now need to be authenticated in order to have landing tabs. This means any new visitor to your Facebook Page will not be able to land on a custom tab unless you have greater than 10,000 fans or the Page administrator has worked with an ads account representative. This is a massive blow to smaller companies (or individuals) looking to build their presence through Facebook Pages.

This update came as a massive blow to Page administrators who were looking to build their fan base organically on their own. As we’ve written about in the past, using landing tabs is critical in converting new visitors into fans. Here’s what was posted on the developer forum earlier today:

Hello all,

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.

Thanks,
Matt Trainer

As you can imagine, developers (and marketers) are not happy. This means that the odds of building a popular Facebook Page are against the average Joe. Instead, administrators will need to spend money on Facebook Ads or alternatively, have a large traffic base on the company’s existing site in order to build a large following.

We’d assume that this change was made for two reasons: to combat spam and more importantly, to boost revenue. We’ll be sure to post any updates as we learn more about the changes. We’re currently trying to find out what impact this will have on third-party solutions (Involver, Sprout, Wildfire, etc) which enable companies to build custom landing tabs. Thanks to Mari Smith for bringing this to our attention.

This also now affects FBML application feature that allows you to change the landing page to a custom tab.

I do a lot of work for small business owners that it will take them a very long time to be able to get 10,000 people to ‘like’ their page so this new limitation is not good hopefully they will rethink this and change it like they did for the pretty url limitations.

I also looked into the advertiser representative and the lowest amount is $10,000 to contact an ad rep.

Tell me what you think about this by leaving a comment.  Have you found a work around?

To clarify, ALL of your custom tabs still exist. And – this is important – each tab still has its own unique URL.  So my suggestion for the WORK around is to take that unique url and hyperlink it to your Facebook icon on your website to direct them to your CUSTOM tab (Welcome page) on your Facebook page for example.