Facebook’s changes to both personal profiles and business
pages have some people scrambling. Without putting some effort into it, people
who view your page will be able to quickly determine that you have not made the
necessary adjustments and will judge your business accordingly. I attended a
LinkedOC event featuring Amy Porterfield, a Facebook expert, to get up to speed
on the changes and how to leverage the new format.
If you don’t do anything else, at least add a cover photo.
Here are the new specs for the cover photo and profile photo: 851x315 cover
photo and 180px sq profile photo. No “calls to action” are allowed in your new
cover photo. It should be mostly graphic (more pictures / less words). Note: you
can’t have the word “like” in your new cover photo.
Once you have completed that task and you are ready to move
on to the less obvious apps / tabs features, you will notice them now located
under the cover photo. It appears that you can re-arrange all of them except
for the photos tab and you can have up to 12 apps or tabs, however only four
appear until you click on the arrow on the right-hand side.
With a free version of Lujur.com, you can pull in tweets or
blog posts into one of your top 12 boxes that show up under the cover photo. It
isn’t completely intuitive, but it isn’t rocket science, either. You can see an
example of one I created for my Facebook page here: I don’t love it, but for a free version of something that took me less than one
hour to create, it isn’t terrible. Notice, one of the new features of these
apps / tabs is they have their own URLs to link to.
You have to adjust your settings on each of the tabs to
change the pictures and titles of these new apps: 111 x 73 pixels for custom
thumbnails on apps. There is another tab creator called tabsite.com, however I
found their free version more limited or not as easy to use – however, they
have more affordable paid versions worth checking out.
E-mail is still critical. One of the most important uses for
one of these custom apps is to pull in your e-mail subscription form. Many
times, people will find your Facebook page before they find your website, so
you want to capture their e-mail address while they are there! Either create a
tab that focuses on the e-mail capture or put it at the bottom of your tab page
that has your best blog post. If they read all the way to the bottom, they are
your best prospects.
If you are currently creating a new website or have a graphic designer who can create some of these elements for you, the best case scenario is to use these new tools to brand your Facebook page so that it looks like it belongs to your website.
Have you tried to make these changes yet? What challenges have you come across?
