Fear, trepidation, anxiety, confusion...in other words another day in a Facebook world.
The End is Near!
Special note: In the video at the bottom of the page I mention a very aggravating bug you may encounter in setting up your business timeline presence. As I find out any workarounds here, I will post updates in the comments. So you may want to subscribe to this post (or check back later).
March 30th is the day looming large for businesses with a substantial investment in their Facebook presence. Many businesses have spent heavily in custom designs and well-planned strategies for getting Facebook visitors to “Like” and engage with their pages. But the rules are changing, in some cases dramatically.
Undoubtedly the most important change for numerous businesses is the loss of the ability to set a specific “default landing page” for their Facebook business presence. Under the new “Timeline” format users will always land on the Timeline for a business page. Many business are gnashing their teeth at this one. All of those carefully analysed customer landing pages will no longer be able to do the job they were intended to, namely to greet a new visitor with a careful marketing message.
Similarly, businesses will loose the option of “fan-gating” or “friend-gating” a page. This is the ability to show one set of content to a visitor who has liked your page and a different set of content to someone who has not.
Since the dust hasn’t settled on Facebook’s changes yet, it’s hard to say what they still might modify. But for now there are a few things that you really need to do quickly so that your business presence is not left looking half, er, complete on March 31st. In this video Ross Barefoot walks you through what those things are and how to deal with them.
