Changes to Facebook Business Pages – FBML, iframes, Layout, and What to Do
It seems like Facebook is always rolling out one change or another to profiles (Facebook for individual users), pages (Facebook for businesses, organizations, and public figures), comments, and apps; as with any widely-used product, some of these changes are better-received than others. One big change goes into effect tomorrow (Friday, March 18), and that’s the changeover from FBML to iframes – a difference in the way your Facebook page customization is coded, stored, and displayed. It’s not a big deal, necessarily – as of right now, it only impacts new custom pages – but it’s coming close on the heels of another big change, and that’s the new layout for business pages; introduced late last year as an option, the layout automatically rolled out to all pages on March 10.
We’ve got layouts and FBML and iframes. And it’s created a bit of (understandable!) confusion.
So how do these new Facebook changes impact my business?
If you’ve never added a custom Facebook design or layout to your Facebook business page, you’re in the clear. You can skip ahead to the section describing the new page layout if you’d like, or go grab a green beer (it is St. Patty’s day, after all.)
Otherwise, unless you’re in the middle of having a custom Facebook page created for you, there is no negative impact, and you probably don’t need to do anything. If you have an old custom Facebook page with a lot of graphics, it may have been cut off or skewed by the changeover to the new layout, which is narrower than the old. Go look at your page, and you’ll be able to tell straightaway. If that’s the case, you’ll need to have a new page created (or at least have the old one edited) for you, so contact your web team about the issue.
Facebook has stated that they will support the technology behind old-style (FBML) custom pages for at least a year, but they’re also recommending that you “upgrade soon”, so make sure to add a FB page upgrade into your marketing plan and budget later this year.
Where did my tabs go? (A look at the new pages)
Old-style FB pages (and profiles) had tabs across the top of the screen; those tabs have now become links and moved underneath the page’s user icon as part of the page navigation. Where the tabs used to be are a series of images. These are the five most recently updated images that you’ve added to (or edited in) your account, displayed randomly, and Facebook hasn’t provided a way to control what appears there (FB statement). If you want to control what images appear there, you’ll need to limit the images in your account to 5, or re-edit old images after you add new ones so that the ones you want are the most recently edited. There’s definitely room for improvement here on Facebook’s end. (But look at the cool things you can do!)
Depending on how active your users are, you may notice that wall posts and comments are out of order; this is because of Facebook’s new “Top Posts” feature. There’s a little drop-down menu under your images thumbnails where you can change this view from “Top Posts” to “Most Recent”, but it’s a user-side setting: you can set it for your personal view, but not for all visitors to your page.
Those are the big changes to layout; you can still add/remove comments, view statistics (“Insights”), and interact with your users like you always have.
So, what’s with the FBML and iframes stuff? (Creating new custom pages)
FBML stands for “Facebook Markup Language”, and it’s what we all used to get custom content, and neat things like videos, added to our Facebook pages. As of tomorrow, March 18, FBML can no longer be added to Facebook pages. That means that old tutorials around the web (like ours!) are no longer accurate.
An iframe is an inline frame – essentially, an entire webpage embedded in another webpage. This has been an available option for a while, but Facebook has made recent improvements to how iframes are implemented on pages, and now it’s the standard. All new custom Facebook pages will need to be built using iFrames.
The biggest difference, in practice, between the two, is that with FBML, you could theoretically have a custom page with nothing more than a YouTube video and some text, or a few images hosted on Flickr and the accompanying FBML. Now, since iframes are complete websites, they need to be hosted somewhere. If you don’t have a hosting account for your website (if, for example, you blog at Blogger or sell at Etsy), you’ll need to obtain hosting for your files in order to have a custom Facebook page.
If you’re a bit tech-savvy and feeling adventurous, we’ve got a post coming up on the blog that will walk you through how to set up a new Facebook custom page for your business using the new iframes setup – be sure to subscribe or like us on Facebook so you don’t miss the details. (You can also subscribe to our newsletter for details on how to get a free custom Facebook page!)
Questions? Comments? Something I’ve missed? Throw it at me in the comments, or use the “Ask a Geek” link in the sidebar.
It’s a bit early for beer, so I’m off to drink some green tea…sláinte!
Dani made this mess on March 17th, 2011 and filed it under Random Drips, Social Media, Tech Splatters