Written by ContentPowered.com
Facebook doesn’t give you much to work with when expanding the capabilities of your page natively. You can use the Facebook Power Editor to access some additional features, but almost all of the real power on the site come sin tabs. They are deceptively powerful, given how little screen estate they’re given, particularly now that Facebook moved them from the top bar to a sidebar subsection. What tabs should you use? Which should you feature?
The Basics
Facebook has four tab apps you can’t change, remove or edit. These are Photos, Events, Videos and Likes.
- Photos are exactly what they sound like; a display of the images you have uploaded to your page.
- Videos are the same; a directory of the videos you have uploaded and chosen to feature.
- Likes is a brief analytics window anyone can see, including some basic information about your trends and popular locations.
- Events are an often-neglected section of any events you choose to run through your page.
These four you should use to the best of your ability. Upload photos with optimized descriptions. Upload videos and feature them, if you want to use video on Facebook at all; YouTube may be a better option, however. Events are useful for running time-sensitive contests, public events and other, well, events. Finally, your Likes app isn’t really under your control, but you can encourage positive metrics to make it look better to anyone giving it a thought.
Heyo
Heyo is a valuable app that allows you to create a new tab app with what is essentially a drag and drop menu. Want an image in place? Drop it into the window and position it. Want to add some text? Click and type. Want to link to an external website? Easy as clicking a button. It’s primarily used for contests, but has an open-ended template you can use to build a replica of your website or anything else. Use it to create themed mini-pages to promote specific products, such as a new podcast, video series, product or contest.
Pagemodo
Pagemodo is another open-ended Facebook app creation suite, but it includes more functionality than Heyo for a correspondingly more complex experience. Bundled with the app are Facebook management tools, to help you create matching cover and profile photos, branded content, apps for contests and tabs for conversions and lead generation.
ShortStack
ShortStack is yet another app designer, this time with a unique twist; the drag and drop model works with widgets, allowing you to use specific widget functionality or layer them on top of one another for a complex yet code-free experience. It has a huge list of usable features seen on their pricing page. Moreover, it’s free below a certain threshold of followers, so if you’re just getting started with Facebook it’s virtually perfect. Don’t forget the mobile compatibility as well.
Thunderpenny
Thunderpenny’s Static HTML editor and Website app are both tab app creators that allow you to create, effectively, webpages inside Facebook. Relive the glory days of the Facebook iFrame craze with the webpage import functionality. Of course, you’ll have to reconfigure or resize a webpage to fit inside Facebook’s window without requiring horizontal scrolling, but that’s not difficult with these apps. Thunderpenny also has ten other apps available to help you expand on the webpage functions.
Tabfoundry
How easy can it be to create a customized tab app for anything? Something simple, with an image, a submission form, a poll, a conversion button. Tabfoundry makes it incredibly easy. Just visit their homepage and watch the animated demo for a moment. If that doesn’t look like the easiest thing in the world, nothing will. Plus, it’s incredibly low-cost for the number of robust options it gives you.
All of those are tab creation tools, but they don’t tell you what you should do with them. How about some tab ideas, to get you started?
- Gated content. If you have anything of value to give away – an ebook, a podcast, a newsletter, anything – you can hide it behind an engagement gate. Hide premium blog posts and require a user like your page to see them. Require a newsletter signup or post share to access an ebook. It’s all easy with tab apps.
- Contests with engagement entries. These are growing increasingly common on Facebook, because they’re so easy to make with any of the tools above. Just make use of a template to start a contest, hide a prize behind the gate and require various social metrics for entries. You can run a simple contest, with one entry per person, one like per entry. Or you can make it more complex, requiring Twitter follows and Facebook shares for extra entries with a high value prize behind them.
- Incentivized coupons. Want newsletter signups? Willing to give 10% off your items for a while? Make an app that requires an email to get a coupon and you’re set. These kinds of apps are incredibly easy to put together – Tabfoundry basically shows you how – and they’re particularly effective as well.
- Advertisements for new content. Launch a new product and create an app to show it off. Anything you could use a webpage for, you can use an app to do as well. As an added bonus, you can run the app early and ask for signups for early registration or a special newsletter to see more information before it’s public.
- Fan features. Yes, Facebook already has pictures and videos in its own apps. However, you can duplicate the functionality and segregate the content. Feature fans, once per month, and put their pictures in an app. Immortalize them, as far as anything on the Internet is immortal.
The sky is the limit with tab apps. For that matter, you might find a novel idea that’s well received by your audience but unmentioned elsewhere. That’s the beauty of Facebook apps; you can create something perfectly tailored to your audience.