These days Facebook reigns supreme as the social media channel of choice for the masses around the world. Just five years ago when I first entered college as a freshmen Facebook was a far cry from the complex social system that it has since become. In those days it was simple – college students only, basic profiles with a wall, photos and a profile photo – nothing more. Now we have games, business pages, more apps than we know what to do with – we can send digital gifts, poke people and display to the world our likes, interests, hobbies, photos and more. Recently surpassing the astounding 500 million user mark, Facebook has become, in essence, a world all on it’s own.
According to their own statistics, 50% of their active users log in to Facebook on any given day and the average person has 130 friends. Each week users spend just under 12 billion hours on Facebook each week (that’s over 700 billion minutes). The average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups and events and produces 90 new pieces of content each month (photos, posts, links, etc.).
These are staggering numbers that anyone with a little common sense will know ought not be ignored – especially in regard to business, marketing, branding and the like. One of my duties as the COO (Chief Operating Officer) of Do You Have 5 Dollars? has been to design and create a custom Facebook business page for our company. Now, the reason I’m getting into all of this with Facebook is this – it is incredible how little the average person knows about how anything digital is created. From website design to iPhone apps to custom Facebook pages, most people have very little knowledge of what is possible, what custom options are available to them and how to go about implementing and building such options.
As is typical of me, I decided to go the hard route on familiarizing myself with the workings of custom Facebook pages and how to design them. Rather than simply networking to find someone to teach me I decided to track down as much info as possible via Google and Facebook’s resources, filter through all the trash that comes with doing it this way and determine what I needed to know all on my own (I don’t recommend doing things this way). Anyhow, after helping some classmates with deciphering the custom Facebook tab I decided that this is something that most people ought to at least have a grasp on especially since Facebook has become such a critical piece in most business marketing strategies.
The first thing that you need to know is that creating your own custom Facebook tab is way easier than you think – the most difficult part is that it requires a little bit of HTML code but even this can be resolved with the countless websites that offer sample code for basic designs. These code samples (I’ll give you a couple below) can be dropped into your application and with a few quick tweaks you’ll be good to go.
So rather than just telling you to go out and figure this whole thing out on your own, I’m opting to do you one better and give you a quick step-by-step run down of how to create your own custom Facebook tab. This will be an extremely simple page – just a splash page more or less (a splash page is a basic page with a simple graphic and some links – a splash page is often used as a place holder while a site is being built or while, in this case, you are working on creating a more complex page). Anyhow, here we go:
• The first thing is that this only works on Pages – business or organization or group pages – it will not work for personal profile pages.
• Click on the “+” tab at the top of your page and then select “FBML” – this should add the FBML tab to your page (it will be completely blank).
• Click on the “Edit Page” link located under the profile picture. Next select “Applications” in the left sidebar menu – from there, scroll down until you find the FBML Application and click on “Go to Application.”
• You should be taken to the page where you can enter/edit the code for your page.
• In the “Box Title” area type in the title of the tab that you would like to be displayed on your page – keep this short, longer titles will get cut off when users are on any of your other tabs.
• Now you enter your code. For now I want my page to be a single graphic that when clicked will link the user to the High Minded Lowlifes website. I also want the image to be centered on the page.
• In order to display a graphic it must be hosted somewhere online – for those of you who don’t already have web hosting you can do this by using Photobucket – just upload your photos and then copy the link into it’s designated place in the code.
• Here is the code:
<center>
<a href=”YOURWEBSITE”><img src=”LINKTOYOURIMAGE”/></a>
</center>
Here is my code:
<center>
<a href=”http://highmindedlowlifes.com”><img src=”http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5090/5227706693_012d8d1419.jpg”/></a>
</center>
• Now save your changes, go back to your page and go to your new custom tab. Mine looks like this now:
• So now you have the custom page done – what now? At this point there is one last thing that I highly recommend doing – set your new custom tab as the default landing page for users (designate the custom tab as the first page new users will see when they visit your Facebook page). This, in my opinion, is a no brainer – as much as we all like to see who has said what and what new links you posted on you page, that stuff just does not hook people. We all like photos, images, graphics, etc. A photo, generally speaking, will always attract more attention from users than text of any kind. This means that you want you don’t want new users coming straight to your wall but rather you want them to land on your new custom tab that has whatever excellently eye-catching graphic you’ve added to the page. It will hook people in more and drive more traffic and “Like” clicks from your audience.
• Go to your “Wall” tab and just above right of the area where you can enter a status update click on “Settings.” Now change the default landing page to your custom tab. That’s it – YOU’RE DONE.
A word about the “Like” button: This is another key feature that you need to have on your website. I’m not talking about your Facebook anything – your website, blog, online store… whatever. Getting people to Like your site on Facebook is basically free marketing and promotion – the more people that Like it, the more people that see it. Whenever a person clicks Like, it is automatically shared with their friends – if you have a great site this can be exponentially growing marketing that costs you nothing. (Funny thing is, I don’t have a prominent Like button here on the blog – but that’s not due to lack of attempts).
I hope this was a nice informative break from the norm – I’ll be doing these “You Should Know” posts every now and then, giving you straightforward explanations on various subjects. If you end up using this to put together your own Facebook page shoot me the link, I’d like to see what you can put together.
If you have any questions or want some info about making your page a little bit more complex, feel free to leave me a comment with your questions and I’ll answer them to the best of my knowledge.
