In my Internet Marketing and Social Media travels at Cazbah, I’ve been cruising along and trying to come up with new ideas on how to tie together all social media outlets on a Facebook fan page without having to add a whole slew of new tabs that you don’t end up seeing anyway. How many users actually click on that little arrow to see what other tabs are available?
I also wanted a way to introduce any potential new customers to the company at a quick glance – in other words – where are all the places I can learn more about this customer online? If a user knows nothing about my customer and their first encounter is via the Facebook fan page, I want to give them instant access to everything so they can quickly become immersed in all that my customer has to offer.
Custom Facebook Fan Page Boxes using Static FBML.
The Static FBML application on Facebook gave me a way to do this. While this application does have some limitations, I was able to use the functionality of adding a new FBML Box on my customers page to custom craft the list of links I wanted to present.
To make it easily recognizable to the visitor, I added in familiar thumbnail images using embedded image links from Flickr (since you cannot upload photos directly to use in your FBML code).
It’s basic html table code, and I’m told there is a better way to do this (eg CSS) – but this is relatively straightforward to setup.
Since Facebook requires us to work within the confines of their architecture – it’s important that we learn to make the most of the tools and applications made available to us. I am hopeful that big changes are on the horizon for how business can better use Facebook, but for now, this provides a solution that I am happy with. (View live example.)
Also see “Adding Vertical Response Opt-In Forms to Facebook Pages” for another way to customize your Facebook fan page.
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Great post, Wendy. Regarding your comment about looking for “new ideas on how to tie together all social media outlets on a Facebook fan page without having to add a whole slew of new tabs,” I would suggest you check out the HyperArts Fan Page, which uses tabbed sub-navigation created with a mix of CSS, HTML and FBML. And your readers may find my posted tutorial for Static FBML very helpful. There are tons of comments, as well, resulting in lots of good info about adding and using Static FBML. We also have a tutorial on embedding video and Flash in Static FBML pages, and lots of other tutorials and info.
Keep up the good work!
It was interesting to look at the HyperArts Fan Page. I think you should consider experimenting with these techniques on your Artichoke page…in your spare time.
Excellent work. You amaze me.
btw.. there are facebook page templates already! created especially for the FBML application.. not much of them though.. for instance here – http://www.flashmint.com/show-type-facebook.html