Facebook Slaps Small Business and Nonprofits in the Face Today
Facebook just announced that only fan pages with 10,000 fans can set their “home” page to a custom tab. All our calls to action Welcome pages created to increase your fan base will just be another tab that no one will ever look at.
Facebook just stopped custom tabs from being the opening to a fan page without telling us! Okay so we aren’t paying customers but we are a critical part of the Facebook business model – without such a big user base, all those paying ads would be worthless.
A Facebook Developers forum just had this post 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
Give me a Break!
You’d think that after the recent privacy uproar that they would put more thought into how they are evolving Facebook. I’ve long felt that they are slowly moving to a pay-for-service model so perhaps if they piss off the little people – only those left will be willing to pay.
This sounds like a book topic – How Facebook Got Arrogant and Greedy, The rise and fall of a social media giant.
I don’t want that to happen but a few years ago who would have thought that MySpace was going to wither away and experts are already sharing that Twitter isn’t nearly as powerful and useful (as a marketing tool) as we’re lead to believe.
My Advice
Start a blog and make it the center of your social networking world. You own it, you control it and the Constitution protects your freedom of speech. Just use sites like Twitter and Facebook for a part of your outreach – not the basis for building a business.
Sorry if there are typos or errors in this rambling post. I’m just mad and you should be to if you use Facebook to promote your business.
