This tutorial
describes how you can create custom apps for your Facebook Fan pages in
minutes.
Your Pages can have maps, tweets, slideshows, music and more inside
Tabs.
Facebook has made
some significant changes to the layout of Facebook Pages in recent months. The
custom landing tabs are gone and all Facebook Pages are now rendered using the
new Timeline view. Page owners can add cover photos and they can also highlight
important stories by pinning them to the top.
Facebook Pages, by
default, include apps for Events, Photos, Videos and Notes. However, if you
would like to include custom information on your Facebook Page – maybe a Google
Map of your business or YouTube videos or maybe a calendar of events – you need
to create an app for that. Let me share a few good examples.
The official Facebook
Page for Nokia has a Welcome Tab that highlights some of their recent
phones. The Nike page has a Locations Tab that highlights the location of
Nokia stores in the country. Apple’s App Store page has a Featured
Tab where they have put a list of their top-selling apps and games. The Al Jazeera Page on Facebook has
a “Watch Live” Tab where you can watch news right inside Facebook.
Have you ever
wondered how do big brands create such interesting Facebook pages? They may
have big marketing budgets but do you really need to hire skilled designers or
programmers to build such fan pages? Well the answer is obviously no. You can
create beautiful custom apps for your Facebook Page without writing a single
line of code and all you need are few minutes.
Building
Custom Tabs (Apps) for Facebook Pages
Facebook Apps for
Pages, in simple English, are like regular web pages that are embedded inside
Facebook using the IFRAME tag. Thus, any object that can be embedded in a HTML
web page – like audio MP3s, Google Maps, YouTube videos, presentations, Google
Calender, jQuery Carousels, photo slideshows, etc. – can be easily added to
your Facebook Pages.
Before we get into
the actual process of creating custom tabs (or apps) for Facebook Pages, we
need a find a place to host the HTML, CSS, Images, JavaScript and other files
associated with our web pages. I prefer using Google Sites to host pages
because they are free, you get a WYSIWYG editor to create pages and Google
Sites can be integrated with Google Analytics so you more easily track visits
to your Facebook pages.
The other big reason
is that Google Sites can serve pages over secure (https) and regular (http)
connections. This is an extremely important point because a majority of
Facebook users may have turned on “secure browsing” in their security settings.
If your Facebook app serves content from a regular (http) URL, all these users
will see is a warning message and you definitely don’t want this to happen.
Google Sites is thus a recommended option.
Hope you like
this post !