Thought you knew all that was capable with your company fan page on Facebook? Think again!
Recently Facebook made a big announcement which has changed the opportunities for your brand’s Facebook Fan Pages. See post: Facebook announcement..
The details of the recent Page changes include things like page tabs moving over to a vertical left navigation, how your Fan Page’s profile picture size has changed, and how you can now communicate with your fans as your fan page itself instead of as a person. Those are all pretty cool changes, but in our mind they are not the most important!
Also included in Facebook’s announcement was a much more compelling change. Page Tabs can now be created using an iFrame. To the casual reader that may not have much of an impact, but over the next few weeks and months as it starts to sink in, it’s going to change the way companies interact with their fans on Facebook!
Up until now, Page Tabs have been created using Facebook’s own FBML coding. However, the content had many rules and technical limitations.
In short, many of the things companies have been used to doing for the last 10+ years on the web was not possible, or, at least, very difficult to do in a Facebook Page Tab.
With iFrames, this has changed!
By allowing developers like TabSite to build iFrame-based tabs, we finally get all functionality back. iFrames give TabSite the ability to interact directly with the viewer’s browser without all of the Facebook markup re-writing getting in the way. We can now build truly robust pages inside a Facebook Fan Page, and, importantly, we can now effectively track each user-interaction.
Of course, there are still some rules that Facebook has outlined. For example, Apps on Fan Pages must not host media that plays automatically without a user’s interaction. This means that while they no longer prevent your Flash file from loading, they still require that you prevent it from launching until a user interacts with it.
What does this mean for TabSite?
This is where the news gets real exciting!
In place of the limited code language of FBML, we’ll get full HTML, javascript, and iFrame capabilities for customizing a Facebook Fan Page.
This means TabSite will be able to roll out new features without limitations imposed by Facebook!
All TabSite accounts will continue to work with no issues!
Expect new and more features from TabSite after March 11 when the change happens!
TabSite is committed to adopting these new abilities and to continuing to build out the best tools for small and medium sized businesses and their fans.
Stay tuned for new details from TabSite in the coming weeks!