Facebook is the official social media networking site and companies are investing millions of dollars in marketing through this site. Above is Starbucks investment in just one of its products among a series of Facebook Pages for their company. But for the small companies and even those that blog for a hobby or want to share stuff and not put a cent into it, there is an option for you too. We will look at using Static FBML and a little web design ingenuity.
Installing Static FBML
To use the Static FBML, we will need to first install the App onto our Facebook Page.
- Make sure that you are not logged in as your Facebook Page and search for static fbml
- Visit the App’s Facebook Page and below their profile picture, click Add to My Page
- A window will pop up with all of the active Facebook Pages you are an admin. Select the correct page.
- Go to your Facebook Page you added the Static FBML and you should now see a new subsection called FBML 1
- Click the Use Facebook as Page option to log into your Facebook Page
- Click the Edit Page in the upper-right hand corner and then the Apps subsection in the left sidebar
- You should now have a FBML – FBML App added to your installed apps. Find it and select its Go to App link
- You should come to a page that has one textbox with “FBML” in it and one large empty textbox. Go ahead and replace “FBML” with the title of this subsection. If you are planning to make several custom pages, make the title specific and short.
- The larger textbox will be where we enter the HTML code to create the Welcome Page.
Configuring Your Page
Now that we have inserted the app, we could start messing around with HTML and creating our Facebook Welcome Page. Before we get to that, lets change the icon in the left sidebar navigation and make this the initial page you see when you come to this Facebook Page.
- Go back to your Facebook Page’s Edit Page admin section and on the left sidebar, click Manage Permissions
- Change the Default Landing Tab from Wall to the page that we will be creating. We titled ours as Welcome
- Save the changes
Writing the Content
Now that we have configured the Welcome page, we can begin coding its contents. Facebook does not host any files nor will it run anything but HTML and CSS, so all images need to be stored elsewhere and all content on this page will be static. Here are a couple of suggestions for putting up content on this site.
- Use a lot of background images stored on your own website elsewhere.
- Maximize your space on the Welcome page, make sure your backgrounds are at least 530px wide.
- Link to other social media
- Interact with blogs and websites. Don’t make this a substitute.
There are several great examples out that have utilized the Welcome page well, including Pringles, Starbucks, and Red Bull.
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