Chapter 4
Arranging What Your Visitors See
In This Chapter
Finding your new Page
Understanding how apps act as navigation links
Changing the order of the apps
Using the hover card as an ad
You and your Page Admins need to be very familiar with how your Page looks to visitors on Facebook. In Chapter 3 of this minibook, we discuss how to present yourself when new visitors arrive on your Page. In this chapter, we tell you how to move your apps around and switch up your Cover image for the best impact on the Page and in the News Feed.
Finding Your Page
The first question we get from marketers who are new to Facebook is, “How do I find my Page?” Facebook used to make it hard to find one’s own Page, but it created a left-column bookmarks menu with links to everything you need, as shown in Figure 4-1. Click More to see the whole list. Note: You see this bookmarks menu when you’re viewing your Profile’s News Feed.
You can find your Page easily by using any of the following options:
- Look for the Page name in the left column of your personal account’s News Feed. Any Page that you created or serve as Admin for will be listed there, below the Pages heading. If you’re an Admin for more than four Pages, click the More link that shows up when you hover over the Page names to open a new page with all your Pages listed.
- Click the down arrow in the upper corner and select your Page name from the drop-down menu. This is the preferred method of navigating to your Page because now you’re officially logged in as your Page and acting as your Page on Facebook. The other methods described here result in you still being logged in as your profile while on your Page. That isn’t a problem but may be confusing if you try to go to your Page’s News Feed.
Figure 4-1: The bookmarks menu appears to the left of your News Feed.
- Add the Page’s username to the browser bar after www.facebook.com. After you get a vanity URL (see Chapter 3 of this minibook for how to create one), you can add the username to the Facebook URL in your browser bar and then bookmark the URL on your computer for easy access. This is how an URL looks after you add the vanity URL: www.facebook.com/yourusername. For example:
- Use the Facebook search bar. This search bar is at the top of every Facebook page. Start typing your Page’s username, and Facebook displays it for you to select. If your business Page doesn’t come up as you type, type the name of the Page completely and then click the See More Results link at the bottom of Facebook’s suggestions list.
You may also see the Find All Pages Named choice from the drop-down menu, and then your search term. When you click that choice, you have a list of Pages with that term in the name.
This Facebook search function — Graph Search — is pretty powerful. You can type things like Pages liked by to get a drop-down list of suggestions such as My Friends, Members of a Group, and more. You can use the Graph Search to find all kinds of targeted Interests and other Pages.
Understanding How Apps Act as Navigation Links
In Chapter 3 of this minibook, we give you a little tour of a business Page and show you where everything is located. The boxes below your Cover image that you and your visitors see on your Page are actually applications, which are add-ons that provide extra functionality to your Page. We explain them a bit in Chapter 3 of this minibook and more thoroughly in Book V. In this chapter, we show you how to move them around for the best effect.
As we note in Chapter 3 of this minibook, when you create your Page, the public sees only two apps: Photos and Likes (if at least one person has liked the Page). You can add some great apps to the app section right away, such as Events, Notes, and Video. These apps were developed and designed by Facebook, so they’re in the queue (so to speak), ready to be added to your Page. In Chapter 3 of this minibook and in all the following minibooks (especially Books IV and V), we describe how to add custom-built links, such as Welcome links, store links, YouTube links, and hundreds of others.
Apps act as gateways. You can set up an app to take people back to
- Your website’s home page
- Your product pages (not on Facebook)
- Your sales pages
- Your contest pages
Using a simple image and a link, you can create an app space to link anywhere.
You can also create a Facebook ad that goes right back to the app. If you have a webinar sign-up app, for example, you can create an ad that’s linked directly to that sign-up interface. You can target the ad to your existing fans or use the app as a “fan gate,” requiring a visitor to like your Page to get the webinar info.
If you have a contest, create an ad that links right back to that app on your Page. Design the app so that visitors need to click Like to see the contest rules and enter the contest. This is a fantastic way to garner more likes for your Page and to create buzz and excitement about your contest.
Each app has its own unique URL that you can share anywhere — on Twitter, with your e-mail subscribers, or on your blog. Each app can also be its own mini-website. To get an app’s URL address, click the app and look at the address in the browser window. You can copy and share that address on another site or even paste it into the Status of your Facebook Page to direct your Fans to the app.
After their initial visit to your business Page, most people view your Page’s updates only via their News Feed and Ticker: They will rarely visit your actual business Page. Facebook has a featured called —the hover card — which shows your Cover image, Profile image, and Page category when a reader mouses over your Page name in his News Feed. We go over that topic in a moment. If you want your audience to visit your Page and explore your other apps, you need to provide strong calls to action in your status updates and provide a link directly to the app. Examples of a call to action include a request to like your Page, join an event, or participate in a contest. To develop a stronger sense of community, bringing people back to your Page is an important goal.
Adding Facebook Apps to Your Page
The number of available Facebook-developed apps is getting smaller and smaller. Currently, four Facebook apps are available: Photos, Notes, Video, and Events. When you start your Page, you have only Photos added by default, and you can’t remove the Photos app from your Page.
To make sure that your visitors can see the apps you want, follow these steps:
- Go to your Page and click the down arrow on the right side of the current installed apps just under your cover photo.
- Go to a blank box with a plus arrow and click the plus symbol.
It doesn’t matter which box you select. Facebook adds the app in the next available space.
- Select the app that you want to add from the drop-down menu.
You now see the app showing in the box.
You can also use your Admin dashboard area to add and remove your installed apps to your Page. The Admin dashboard area is especially helpful if you have installed other apps to your Page and aren’t sure how to find them. To see the list of all your apps and add them to your Page through the Admin dashboard, follow these steps:
- Go to your Page and click the Edit Page button in the Admin panel.
- Click Update Page Info.
Your Admin dashboard opens.
- Click the More link and then choose Apps from the drop-down menu.
The Apps tab shows all the apps connected to your Page.
- Find the app that you want to add to the Apps section of your Page Timeline, and click the Edit Settings link below the name of the app.
A dialog box appears. For most applications, the dialog box has only a Profile tab. The Events dialog box has two tabs: Profile and Additional Permissions. The Additional Permissions are needed if you want to allow the Events app to publish the event(s) to your Timeline.
- Click the Add Link on the Profile tab.
What you see next depends on the app you’re adding. We note those variations later.
- Click Okay.
The app is listed in your Page’s app section for all to see. You may have to adjust the position of the app, as we show you later in this chapter.
You can use these instructions to turn on any of the following Facebook apps.
Events app
If your business has events, you may want to add this link by following the steps in the preceding section. Figure 4-2 shows a convention center’s Events page. Notice that the interface has tabs for Upcoming Events and Past Events.
Figure 4-2: The Events application lists the Events that your business wants to showcase.
If you click an Event title, you’re taken to that particular event Page. Using Facebook Events for marketing is discussed thoroughly in Book VI, Chapter 1.
Photos app
This application is automatically added in the app section for a new Page. Because Facebook redesigned the whole photo interface (with a grid-style photos stream, and the ability to like and comment on the photo thumbnails), you want to make sure your photos are a great addition to your Page.
Having this app on your Page allows visitors to see the photos you uploaded to your Page and also photos tagged with your Page’s name (if you set that option in your Page settings). You can arrange your photos in custom-titled albums, but Facebook keeps your Profile images in one album called Profile Pictures (and you can’t change the name of this album).
If you post a photo to the Page Timeline, Facebook puts it in an album called Timeline Photos. You can’t change the name of this album, either, but you can delete photos that end up in this album. We discuss photo uploading, arranging, album naming, and the world of images in Book IV, Chapter 1.
As we discuss in Chapter 3 of this minibook, you can prevent a liker from posting photos to your Page by making the appropriate setting in the Posting Ability section after selecting Edit Page and Edit Settings on your administrative dashboard.
People who click the Photo app on your Page see your Page’s Photos Stream. This is a tight grid of all the photos you, as your Page, have uploaded. The three tabs at the top are
- Photos of the Page: Photos tagged with your Page name
- Photos: Photos that you (as your Page) uploaded
- Albums: Photos that you have uploaded as an album or are naturally grouped together such as Profile photos, Timeline photos, or Mobile uploads
Clicking the Photo app on your Page takes users to the middle tab — Photos. Notice each photo has the interface to like the photo and comment without having to open the photo to full view.
When users click the Album tab, they see the album as thumbnails. If you hover over an album thumbnail, a five-image slideshow starts inside the thumbnail space, which is handy to quickly see whether this is the album you want to open.
When you click any album, another grid appears with the same setup of seeing the Like and comments interface on the thumbnails of the photos in the album. When you click an individual photo, a lightbox opens. A lightbox is a dialog box that shows specific information — in this case, your photos, descriptions, and any comments. The lightbox has arrows on either side so that the visitor can move through the photo album one image at a time. Hidden links show up when a visitor hovers over the bottom of any image: Tag Photo (may not be visible if the Tag option is not enabled by the Page), Options, Share, Send, and Like.
If you’re an Admin of the Page, you see several other links below the Options link: Edit Location, Change Date, Rotate Left, Rotate Right, Download, Make Profile Picture, Make Album Cover, Get Link, Move to Other Album, Delete this Photo, and Enter Fullscreen. Your visitors to your photos see only Download, Embed Post, Report, and Enter Fullscreen. Each option is fairly self-explanatory, except for the Embed Post, which we discuss more in Book IX. You can embed any Facebook post into your blog or website.
You can use photos like ads because you can upload an image of your promotional page or text. Then, in the description section, place the hyperlinked URL that people can click to buy a product or sign up for something. Figure 4-3 shows an example of how much information you can put in the description section. We spend some time on the marketing possibilities of photos in Facebook in Book IV, Chapter 1.
Figure 4-3: Notice the full description (on right) that includes links.
Notes app
A note is a public post and appears in the News Feed for all fans to see, and anyone tagged in the note receives a notification. The Notes app used to be the only place to publish a really long post, but now you can have an almost unlimited number of characters (currently more than 63,000) in a regular post, too. We like to think of a note as being similar to a blog post. You can title the note, upload a photo with it, and add some formatting (bold, italic, underline, bullets, numbering, and quotations) to it. The people who are tagged receive a notification and can view the note. (They can untag themselves if they don’t want to be attached to the note publicly.)
You can create a note and tag people and Pages to view it. You can tag your Friends and any Facebook Page. When you create a note, a notification appears in your Page Timeline and goes out to your likers’ News Feeds for everyone to see.
You can consider the Notes apps as a blog, an additional blog, or a larger posting space. You can create a special type of conversation among you and your likers. This conversation space could be for people who are enthusiastic about a particular subject. If you’ve already added the Notes app to your app section (see the generic instructions in “Adding Facebook Apps to Your Page,” earlier in this chapter), follow these steps to create and manage your notes:
- Click the Notes app in your Page’s app section below the Cover image.
If you don’t see the app, you need to add it to the app section. (See “Adding Facebook Apps to Your Page,” earlier in this chapter.)
- Click the +Write a Note button in the top-right corner.
This button opens an editing space where you can create a title, type the text of the note, tag people and/or Pages, add a photo, preview, save a draft, and publish.
- Enter the title and body of the note.
You can use a few formatting tools, such as bold and italic.
A note can be really long. How long? We don’t know exactly, but we’ve seen up to five pages’ worth fit in there. So write away!
- Tag people and Pages.
To tag a person or a Page, start typing the person’s name or the Page name in the Tag field. Facebook displays a list of your Friends and Pages. Click the ones you want to tag (see Figure 4-4).
- Click the Add a Photo link, browse to the photo on your computer, and upload it.
Figure 4-4: Tag a person or Page in your note.
- Click Publish, Preview, Save Draft, or Discard.
You can decide how to proceed with this step:
- Publish: Your note is published to the world! The note shows up as a Page status update and appears in likers’ News Feeds. Any people or Pages you tagged are notified. Anyone can read and comment on your note.
- Preview: When you click Preview, you see exactly how your note will look when viewed. It has two links at the top: Publish and Edit. You can edit the note (click Edit) or go ahead with the publishing process (click Publish).
- Save Draft: Click the Save Draft to save draft of this note to work on later. The next time you want to edit the note, look for the Notes app box. When you click that box, a Page Name Drafts link appears next to the Page’s name. Click the Drafts link to see a list of all your note drafts (see Figure 4-5). Just click the title you want to start editing. Non-Admins won’t see the link to your drafts.
- Discard: Discarding a note removes it from your drafts. Discard is a way to delete before something is published.
Figure 4-5: Click the Notes app box and then the link to your drafts to choose the Note to edit.
When your visitors click the Notes app, they go to an interface with your notes on the left and notes by other Pages they’ve liked on the right.
Many Pages use the Notes app to create a daily list of events in their stores or a daily webinar schedule with quick links to the Event pages. There are many ways to use this particular app.
We don’t recommend using Facebook Notes as a blog because the Notes feature has been rumored to be going away. In any case, you don’t want to put anything in the Notes feature without a backup copy somewhere else.
Video app
Here’s another app that you may need to think through before you add it to your Page’s app section. The Facebook Video app may not be the best app for you to use on your Page. If your business uses a lot of videos, you may want to explore a few third-party apps before making a final decision to add this one. As an alternative, we discuss using YouTube for marketing in Book III, Chapter 1.
Here are a few points about the Facebook-built Video app:
- If you post a status update with a YouTube URL, the video won’t show up on the Video page. You have to upload or record a video with the Facebook Video app for the video to be listed on the Video page.
- Facebook does provide a lightbox interface for videos the way it does for photos.
- If people share your Page’s video by posting it to their Timelines, users have the option to like your Page by clicking a Like button in the corner.
The Facebook Video app does show up separately on your Page but is actually incorporated as an Album within your Photos. Click the Photos App, and you see a spot to add a Photo or a Video in the upper right.
The video size limit is up to 20 minutes long with a maximum size file of 1,024MB. Facebook supports almost all video file formats, but you may have the best luck with the MP4 format. This page in the Facebook Help section lists all the supported types:
https://www.facebook.com/help/218673814818907
The easiest way to upload a video is to
- Go to your Facebook Page.
- Click the Photo/Video selection.
- Click Upload Photos/Video.
- Add some text about the video.
- Click Choose File to browse your computer for the video you want to upload.
- Click Post to share the video to your Timeline.
You can go to the Photos app on your Page and click the Add Video button in the top-right corner of the page. As of this writing, the Photos app offers this option, but not the Video app.
Changing the Order of Apps on Your Page
All apps on your business Page, except Photos, can be rearranged for added exposure. Three apps — Featured apps — are visible. When you click the See All link, you see all your Apps that are installed on your Timeline (Favorites), but the visitors to your Page see only the first the first 12 apps. You can add and remove apps from Favorites. Because the only visible apps are the ones in the first three, make sure those are arranged how you want. To rearrange the order of the apps, follow these steps:
- Click the down arrow next to your apps to expand all the apps you have available.
- Mouse over the app you want to move.
You see a pencil icon in the top-right corner of the app, as shown in Figure 4-6.
Figure 4-6: Hover over an app to reveal the pencil icon, then click the icon to swap the app.
- Click the pencil icon.
A drop-down menu appears.
- From the drop-down menu, choose the app to swap.
- Click the arrow next to your apps again to see how the new lineup looks.
You may need to repeat this process to get the apps in the positions where you want them.
After clicking the pencil icon, you can also choose Remove from Favorites to make the app box disappear. You can still get to the apps you’ve removed; see Chapter 2 of this minibook for details.
Using the Hover Card as an Ad
A nice little feature that Facebook has is the hover card (see Figure 4-7). A hover card is a little pop-up box that contains a quick view of information about a Page or person (including the Cover photo, Profile image, or Page category) when you hover your cursor over the person’s or Page’s name in your News Feed.
From a hover card, you can
- Like or unlike a Page.
- Request to be a Friend or subscriber.
- Add to an Interest list or create a custom list for the person or Page.
- Message the person or Page.
- Get Notifications.
- Adjust your Settings (show all updates, most updates, or only important).
Figure 4-7: Hover cards give you a quick view of information about a person or Page.
The nice thing about a hover card is the overall impression it gives. See Figure 4-8 for a well-done Page design with a really nice hover card that works as an ad without being an ad!
Figure 4-8: This hover card for New Media Expo looks like a wonderful ad without being an ad.
To create beautiful hover cards like the one shown in Figure 4-8, do the following:
- Make sure your Page’s Cover photo is an inviting image that conveys the spirit of your upcoming event.
- Create and upload a new Profile image that includes the dates and location of the upcoming event.
- Check your Page type under Edit Page, Update Info. Change the category in the fields provided.
After you complete these tasks, hover over your own Page’s name in the Timeline to see how your hover card looks.