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Facebook Custom Tabs for your Business Page

Facebook is constantly upgrading their page layouts and introducing new features to improve the ‘Facebook experience’. In the past year they have introduced the timeline into business pages.

One of the many features affected by this change was the page tab feature. Page tabs are the specialized buttons that you add particular snippets of content to on your Facebook Page.

Creating and adding your own personal tabs is important to your company’s Facebook Page as it does two key things:

1. It makes your page look professional and sexy which will encourage more participation, engagement and more likes when people land on, or view, your page.
2. It allows your company to integrate elements that would normally be on your website into your Facebook page. Such as “apply now,” “contact us,” “about us,”or “services,” etc. Many users now do social research on a business before they look up their website. Simply put, your fans are comfortable on Facebook and are more willing to engage with your brand on that platform.

How a Facebook Tab works is that it Facebook allows you to set up Iframes that draw information from an external link that is 810px width and unlimited length. So your content is not actually sitting on Facebook but on an external website of your choosing. If you do not have web development experience, setting up an application can be a little discerning, but if I can do it, anyone can!

To set up a Facebook Custom Tab on your Facebook page you need to have two things:

1. SSL certificate on your website where your content sits (or Facebook will block your content to people browsing on https://
2. Facebook Developers account (you can sign up here: facebook.com/developers)

There are also premade Facebook Tabs you can purchase or install for free from sites such as www.woobox.com. These are perfect if you do not have any web development experience.

How to determine what tabs are best for you

To determine what apps you can use for your company’s custom tabs, you will have to consider:

• The amount of fans you currently have
• The amount of pages your company currently has
• Your objectives
• Your current technical skill set
• Whether you need original material to add or not
• The relevant aspects of your company in which you want to be made public

Now that you know exactly what you need let’s take a look at some of the different custom tabs you can use on your Facebook business page.

Custom Tab Ideas

1. Contact Forms
2. Sign Up Forms
3. Product Lists and Catagories
4. Competition Tabs
5. RSS Feeds
6. Facebook e-commerce Stores
7. Order/book/shop Online Tabs
8. ‘About us’ tabs
9. Other Social Media Links such as Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram