Yesterday there was an announcement made in the Facebook Developer forums that Facebook is now limiting the ability to set custom landing tabs to profiles that are “authenticated” and have over 10,000 fans/likes. I am cautiously posting this because I have not yet seen an official announcement from Facebook about this and the profiles that I administer still appear to have this option.
To explain a little better what that means. Originally administrators for public profiles were able to set a specific tab other than the WALL or INFO tab that new visitors would see first. This is often used for a place to encourage people to become fans with some sort of incentive. I.e. “Become a fan and receive a voucher for two free whoopie pies”. With the new change all new visitors will be sent to either the WALL or INFO tab.
Here’s the post from the Developer forum:
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
Facebook Developer Network Team
Link to post: http://forum.developers.facebook.com/viewtopic.php?pid=227722#p227722
So essentially Facebook is going after the big companies and sending a message to small to medium sized businesses that they are not important.
I’m not sure how all of this will play out, but it looks like Facebook is making another financially driven, sweeping change.
