experience matters

Lindsay Renwick | Critical Mass Toronto

The good folks at Facebook caused quite a flap last week when they announced a major change to the custom Landing Tabs feature on Facebook Pages. The upshot was that Pages would have required a minimum of 10,000 fans or an existing relationship with a Facebook advertising representative in order to qualify for a custom tab.

Mere days later, the policy has been rescinded due to the overwhelming outcry. Claiming that the change would stack the deck against companies trying to use Facebook to deftly and inexpensively build a social following, marketers, developers and small businesses persuaded the world’s largest social network to reconsider. The furore is dying down, but it remains a sobering reminder to businesses and to the agencies who recommend and maintain Facebook Pages for their clients, that carefully-crafted plans can come tumbling down at the flick of a digital switch.

Would it really have been that bad?

With the potential crisis averted, let’s explore the question of whether this would have been as huge a disaster as predicted.

At no point did Facebook threaten the wholesale removal of brand pages from the network. Brands would have been permitted to maintain their Wall feeds as usual which means that the social activity the Pages feature was designed to host and foster was never under threat. Brands with active and engaged community managers would have been free to continue building their followings by posting links to their Wall pages, generating discussions and hosting contests.

What would have been limited are the static Landing Tabs, which provide good SEO, allow a quick hit of brand messaging, and provide ongoing work for developers. While brands that can afford the investment have engaging and interactive Landing Tabs, smaller businesses tend to use them as a one-stop spam page that users bounce from nearly immediately.

People searching for brands on Facebook are looking to interact with the brand and each other in meaningful ways. Diverting them to a static page devoid of added value or interactivity is a lot like inviting people to a backyard cookout and then propping a cardboard cutout of yourself wearing an apron against a cold barbeque. It’s tough to convince people to stay very long. For many Facebook users, automatically clicking to a brand’s Wall before the Landing Tab has even finished loading has become the new “Skip Intro” link.

Don’t agree? Try this little experiment. Use your own Facebook status to poll your personal network for their opinions on Facebook’s recent privacy controversy and watch the fur fly as your friends and neighbors fall all over themselves to sound off. Next, ask if anyone you know was particularly cheesed about the threat to custom Landing Tabs and see how the response compares.

So, would it really have been a disaster if Facebook had required the brands using Landing Tabs to have either the following or the money to produce a relevant experience? While digital marketers may breathe a sigh of relief at the reprieve, there’s an argument to be made that the change may have forced us to create Facebook campaigns that turn users into fans by curating compelling Wall feeds fostering discussion, participation and sharing, rather than imagining the space as just another broadcast medium.

Linday is an Influence Marketing Manager in Toronto. (She personifies Ella Nutella as Nutella Canada’s ambassador in the social media space.)