Creating a Custom Landing Tab on Facebook

Date Posted: 31-12-11

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A Landing Tab is the page you are directed to when you either type in a Facebook URL or search for the name of a Page within Facebook and then click on that. The default setting is the Wall, but Facebook allows you (unless you have chosen to have a Community Page) to select any page you currently have as your landing page.

You may decide that the Wall is the perfect place for people to land when they visit your page or some Pages instead choose to direct people to the Info Tab instead. Given a key Facebook strategy is to increase the number of page ‘Likes’ received, many companies choose instead to create a customised landing page, which attempts to persuade visitors to click the ‘Like’ button or simply provides the visitor with vital information that the company wants you to see. 

If you work for a larger company you may very well have someone in-house with the graphic design capabilities to design a suitable graphic for your page. However if you work for a smaller business, there may be nobody internally that can help. You can do it yourself, and I will show you how to do that, but essentially you have two problems.

Firstly, it is going to be critical that your page looks professional but also that it does exactly what you want it to do from a technical stand-point. So if you have graphic design abilities and are reasonably tech-savvy you can do it yourself, but I would strongly urge you to consider paying a professional graphic designer or web company to do this for you. Having experimented with this, I don’t consider it a good use of my time to try and do it myself when a web company can do it much faster and it will do exactly what I want it to do.

OK, so if you do want to have a go yourself there are two stages. Firstly you need to create the page by adding an appropriate app then you need to tell Facebook that you want to use the new page as your Landing Page. For this example I have used an app called ‘Woobox Custom Tab’  https://www.facebook.com/Woobox but the Wilfire i-frame App is another easy to use alternative and there are many others out there that offer different levels of functionality. The thing I liked about the Woobox app was that you don’t need a knowledge of HTML coding to be able to create your page.

Before you do anything you need to design your new page as a picture using whichever arts package you are used to (PaintShop etc) and then save it on your computer.

Then on Facebook you need to: 

1. Search for the Woobox app or another appropriate app using the search tool at the top of your page – type in static i-frame tab and you will get a selection of options.
   
   
2. Install the app – if you are Admin of several pages you will need to select which page you want to add it to.
   
   
3. Next, if it is the Woobox app you are using, select the ‘Edit’ link under the Welcome Heading on the left of your page. If nothing happens you need to establish the link between your page and the app. To do this click ‘Edit Page’ then select the ‘applications’ link on the left. This will bring up a list of available apps for your page. Find the app you have just installed and click on the ‘link to this tab’ and then OK when the appropriate page name is displayed.
   
   
4. Go back to the new Welcome Tab and click on it. You should now have an editor appear. 
   
   N.B. Non-fan source is what is shown to people who aren't yet fans. Page source is what's shown once some has passed through all the gates, so once they are a fan.
   
   
5. Firstly enable the work-around option at the top of the page then go to the section for non-fans (non-fan page source) and click on Image, this then lets you brows and upload an image from your computer.
   
   In the section marked ‘page source’ you can also add in content for people to see once they are fans of the page. You can do this easily either by uploading another picture or if you just want text, click on HTML then select the small link to ‘Editor’, which then opens an easy-to use editor.
   
   Click Save Settings and you are done!

 

To divert traffic to your new page: 

1. Click on ‘Edit Page’
2. Select ‘Manage Permissions’
3. Half-way down the page you will see the field ‘Default Landing Tab’, choose your new page from the drop-down box.

 

N.B This is how you would go about changing any page to your landing tab.

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