The Resource
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Facebook Timeline: Continued from page 28 ...
displayable tabs (3 if you don’t count the permanent “Photos” tab, which cannot be moved or altered). But if you want additional tabs, you can click a dropdown arrow to have a total of 12 available tab slots. •
If the tabs were to change, you could probably guess the apps themselves would, as well. The size has gone from 520px to 810px. Another welcome change—the apps will be appearing in their own screen instead of being built into your page. (They needed to find a way around all that additional white space.) Let your creative juices start to flow on this one!
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Default landing pages - this one is a massive loss in my opinion. No longer can you have non-fans and first time visitors drop in to a pre-determined page. However, you may be able to remedy this with a clever combination of the new “sticky posts” on your Timeline with URL links and Cover Image arrows to direct people’s attention over to your custom welcome tabs, sweepstakes tabs, etc.
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Direct messaging of pages... yep, people can now message your page directly for “inquiries”... Can’t wait to start receiving spam on this!
What’s staying the same? Let’s see - it’s still called Facebook, you are able to post updates, and people can “like” your page. All kidding aside, despite the drastic changes to Facebook - there are a couple things that are still staying the same... which I am glad to hear because I was quite worried about these: •
Fan Gating is still going to work! Don’t listen to the buzz about this one—fan gating has to do with the construction of the application CODE and thus is not affected by these changes. So you CAN still entice people to like your page by offering up Fan Only content... you just can’t tell them to like your page in the Cover Image.
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Facebook Insights for the most part are going to remain the same. However, these are actually being somewhat simplified (another welcome change).
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I guess I should have mentioned this in “What’s Changing,” but it’s still staying somewhat the same, as well. Your profile image—we can no longer have those big, custom, vertical banners that act as advertisements for our services and give contact information. Now it’s just a small square, so it should probably be just your company’s logo.
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The “About Me” is remaining pretty much the same.
That’s about it... Hopefully, this helps to clear up some of the mass hysteria and confusion that’s going on out there right now. It’s time to make very good friends with a graphic designer because the majority of these changes are revolving around tweaking your design elements. (Yes, we at New Media Fluent do offer graphic design services. Feel free to contact us for pricing quotes of updates to your Fan Page elements.) When done right, I believe these tweaks have the ability to make your fan page more visually stimulating! Good luck with the changes!
Andrew Jones is President of New Media Fluent, a company that specializes in creating and managing social media platforms for individuals and companies. He can be reached at 918.232.6181 and Andrew@NewMediaFluent.com. Website is http://newmediafluent.com/.