Facebook Update – Welcome pages no longer available
With incredible bad timing, Facebook have now removed the ability for users to direct visitors to a specific tab. This means that all ‘Fan Gate’ style welcome pages will stop working pretty soon. You may have noticed this already if you have switched to the new timeline view for your facebook account.
Although you will no longer be able to create welcome pages for your Facebook visitors, you’ll still be able to create additional tabs (or sub-pages) that you can direct visitors to, but you’ll need to signpost these links in your posts rather than having your visitors directed there automatically.
The DMJ Facebook Welcome page
Do you want to add a welcome page to Facebook, and perhaps one that displays in two different ways depending on whether the visitor has already ‘liked’ you or not? You can even go one step further and add other tabs (Facebook terminology for navigational links in your Facebook sidebar). These can include HTML and JavaScript, so you could build some really slick functionality and design excellence into your pages.
This could add a little more professionalism to your Facebook business pages and, with an appropriate call-to-action, could encourage more people to like you.
Facebook Welcome page for Normandie Rentals
First of all, you’ll need to create a welcome page for your Facebook.
There are a few Facebook apps you can use to do the job, but I’m going to demonstrate the one I used. Before we go too far, take a look at our own DMJ Computer Services welcome page so you can see what you’re aiming for – why not ‘like us’ while you’re there? 🙂
Creating your Facebook Welcome page
I chose the Static HTML: iframe tabs app from a suggested list of 10 Facebook apps for building custom pages to set up my custom welcome page. I did try a few of the other apps in the list, but this was the one that gave me the most flexibility.
Here’s a link to the instructions for installing and configuring the app.
The nice thing about this app is that you can create different welcome pages for fans and non-fans – so the non-fan welcome page could be set up to encourage the visitor to ‘like’ you, and the fan welcome page could contain some helpful hints and tips that you’re happy to give away to your fans.
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