Facebook Page Welcome Tabs: Big Loss Or Good Riddance?

Facebook Apps In Action

"Move fast and break things."

When Facebook filed for an IPO at the beginning of February, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a letter to potential investors contrasted Facebook's hacker style with mature companies that "slow down too much because they're more afraid of making mistakes than they are of losing opportunities by moving too slowly". He concluded, "The idea is that if you never break anything, you're probably not moving fast enough."

The Timeline for Pages redesign Facebook announced Wednesday at a marketing conference in New York broke things, or is about to break them, for businesses that relied on the ability to provide a welcome message to newcomers, nudging them to click the "Like" button. The pages Facebook provides for organizations and celebrities (as opposed to the profiles for ordinary users) actually include several pages, or page tabs, and Facebook is taking away the ability to set a default tab for display to visitors. Instead of being greeted by a billboard urging them to like the page, they will go straight into the conversations in the timeline--so those conversations will have to be the main thing that convinces them this is a community they want to join.

The ability to create a tab that shows a different message to newcomers, as opposed to fans (the people who have clicked the button, becoming subscribers to posts on that page) has not gone away entirely. Brands can drive visitors to that tab with a link in a post, an ad, an email newsletter, a Web page, or any other vehicle. They just won't get the "free advertising" of the default tab display.

[ Will Facebook stock be a good buy? Read 3 Things To Remember Before Investing In Facebook. ]

However, as of mid-day Friday the old "like gate" functionality--where after the visitor clicked the button, the page would refresh to show the fan-only content--wasn't working for pages that had activated the Timeline layout. It took Facebook a couple of days to respond to a bug report, beyond the placeholder response of a developer liaison saying, "We are looking into this." This prompted some anxiety over whether Facebook considered it a bug or a feature; that is, whether it had intentionally removed the gate tab function, along with the ability to set a default landing tab. However, Friday afternoon brought a reassuring answer: "This is a bug and the fix should be in soon. Thanks for your patience!"

It's quite possible I'm exaggerating the importance of this aspect of Timeline for Pages (see disclosure below). It only took me a few hours on Wednesday to rejigger the BrainYard's Facebook page for Timeline, and I hope you'll stop by and click the like button even in the absence of a welcome page--which we didn't have anyway. Many developers, designers, social media professionals, and Facebook users will be glad to see welcome tabs go away, considering them obnoxious.

"I will firmly say I'm glad to see them go," said Ted Sindzinski, a digital marketing strategist based in Orange County, Calif. Welcome page tabs were "not necessarily bad as a concept," but too many marketers "took welcome tabs and turned them into these static advertisements." In his experience, building a fan base with a gate tab promising a $5 off coupon was typically counterproductive. The people who respond to an offer like that aren't looking to join the conversation, they just want the coupon, he said. "We found that when we did gimmicky things, we saw the engagement go down."

"We've always said Facebook success and social marketing was about brands engaging with people," agreed Hearsay Social chief technology officer Steve Garrity. Although Hearsay's software for managing accounts on social media services supported Facebook welcome tabs, their use was never high on Hearsay's list of recommendations, he said. "We always saw landing tabs or welcome tabs as a quick step into social" but not a long-term strategy, he said.

"It's going to penalize the older style of throw up an ad and let people hit it when they come to your Facebook page. Change is hard, and it's always going to be more work," but on balance, brands will be gaining more than they lose through this redesign, Garrity said.

John Nolt, director of product management at another social media management player, Vitrue, had a similar take. Although Timeline will require some adjustments, that's more than made up for by "the really beautiful layouts that can be achieved with the new Timeline, versus the previous page layouts," he said.

Then again, as launch partners for the new design, Hearsay and Vitrue had more warning and time to prepare.

Tim Ware, president of the Web consulting firm HyperArts, has written some of the best guides to developing for the Facebook platform that I've seen, but he did not rate a heads-up, nor did the broader mass of Facebook developers who saw the notice at the top of their Facebook pages after logging in Wednesday morning. "We were all taken surprise by the suddenness and the 30-day deadline," said Ware, who has since developed a Frequently Asked Questions document with some answers for developers.

Ware has learned to take the surprises Facebook delivers in stride, however, and is pleased overall. Under Timeline, page tab creators now get an 810-pixel-wide area to work with, as opposed to the old 520 pixels, which will allow for much greater design freedom. "That's what we got in return for the ability to set a default landing tab--they giveth, and they taketh away," he said.The main timeline page also provides space for a dominant new photo or other image at the top of the page, which can help with branding, Ware noted--although Facebook's guidelines specify that it should not include hard-sell elements such as "like this page for your $5 coupon."

Still, the abrupt disappearance of welcome tabs doesn't really make sense to Ware. "I think it's heavy-handed. I don't understand why they did it, from a logical point of view," he said.

I suggested it might be Facebook's way of shifting more of the service's promotional opportunities to paid advertising, a popular interpretation given the pre-IPO timing. Ware thought that sounded about right.

Now, for the promised disclosure: prior to getting a full-time gig with the BrainYard, I earned part of my living as a Web consultant. About a year ago, I released a plugin for WordPress that blog owners can use to create and update posts to be displayed in a Facebook page tab. It includes some basic Like gate functionality and has often been used to produce welcome tabs--tabs that are about to become obsolete. Because this is free software, and I've only indirectly made money off it, I don't see this as a big conflict of interest, but you can make your own judgement.

One of the users of that plugin is Keith Tharp, who runs a photography business in Londonderry, N.H., that he promotes through Facebook. He also does a bit of Web consulting and site administration. Tharp wrote to me to protest Facebook's callousness toward "people/businesses who have invested a good amount of time, money and effort" into a Facebook design, only to be told that it will be obsolete in 30 days. "They can only get away with saying 'we are the great and almighty FB! that's why' for so long before people will stop playing," he added.

The concern here is partly about scale. If you're Wal-Mart, redesigning page tabs and adjusting marketing strategy in response to Facebook's latest changes is a trivial expense and effort. For a small business that just launched a beautiful new welcome tab the day before Facebook made its announcement, the wasted time, effort, and money is a lot more significant. Many consultants catering to small businesses are also furious because they worry their clients will blame them when their welcome tabs stop working.

When I got Tharp on the phone this morning, he pointed out that it's only been about a year since Facebook shifted to an integration methodology based on HTML iframes that opened up a whole world of new possibilities for page tabs. Now, the question for a small business trying to adjust to Facebook's latest design is "how much money do you invest in that if you're afraid Facebook is going to pull the carpet under from you again in 14 months," he said. "It won't take too many instances of that behavior for people to start abandoning the platform."

Maybe so, but Facebook rebellions are famous for being short-lived, Ware pointed out. "Every time there's a big rollout, a big change, people get up in arms saying, 'I'm leaving Facebook!' Well, nobody leaves Facebook. Leaving Facebook is like leaving your home country, almost. All people can really do is deal with it," he said.

Follow David F. Carr on Twitter @davidfcarr. The BrainYard is @thebyard and facebook.com/thebyard

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