Facebook announces a change to its tab policy…and then took it back.

Yesterday, Facebook made a huge change for Page owners that requires them to have at least 10,000 fans or pay at least $25,000 in advertising in order to use the application that allows for a landing tab for non-followers.

Today, however, Facebook has reverted back to letting anyone set up a tab as a landing page. This comes in the face of widespread dissent and feedback from Page users and Page management companies.

What are landing tabs anyway?

Small and large businesses use Facebook Pages, which are different than personal profiles, to reach Facebook users and get them to “like” their business. For a business, customizing a Facebook Page can be a great marketing strategy.

One way to customize a Page is to use a specific tab as a landing page. It’s a great way to promote a particular marketing campaign. But, just yesterday, Facebook added restrictions to the landing page. These restrictions include the necessity to authenticate a Page before a landing tab can be used. Here’s the blurb from Facebook:

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.

This new authentication restriction was quickly dropped after response from Page owners and businesses who offer Page management services.

Why would Facebook create these restrictions in the first place?

The most likely answer is to respond to the growing amount of spammers on Facebook who are using landing tabs to get people to give away personal information or to spam their friends.

For now, at least, businesses can rest assured that using tabs is still a good strategy for marketing. And let’s hope Facebook can figure out a way to keep people who want to add quality content to their site able to do so without gouging them and keep those spammers and scammers at bay.

Tags: Facebook, marketing, news, small business

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 20th, 2010 at 10:42 am and is filed under social networking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.