Facebook Tabs killed the Websites Star

With Facebook Pages, Who Needs a Website? Seriously, think about it. One of the major fears of any website owner or designer/admin is that "Once my site is made, How soon can I expect to generate traffic to the website?" OR "Once my website is made, HOW do I generate traffic to my website(s)"

 That is one thing that really rocks about Facebook. Generating traffic has never been easier (as long as the visitors are kept on Facebook itself). As long as a publisher can produce rich content, there really are no limits as to the kind of traffic that he/she can potentially generate - owing to the fact that Facebook is infectiously viral. 

 

The virality of FB stems from the following :

1. 
   

   Facebook official stats state that an average registered user on Facebook has an avg of 130 friends on his list.

2. 
   

   Any action taken by a user, automatically updates all his friends "Home" pages. So one update to 100 fans, has the potential of reaching a minimum of 13,000 users. And this is with only ONE update!! Imagine something like a Zoozoo page, no wonder they have 500k+ Fans

3. 
   

   Facebook pages allow a lot of rich media to be uploaded/updated with complete ease. Without any knowledge of HTML/JS or any other CMS interface.

4. 
   

   Creating custom tabs on your Facebook pages can never be easier. A little HTML & photoshop, you can build a custom tab in no time. Lets face it, looking at even a simple colorful image on a custom tab is so much better than continuosly focusing on the drab Page wall...

About the generation of traffic, try and visualise & segregate your target audience out of a total of 500 Million people. This number can even give the biggest website admins wet dreams. Because you are not only trying to hit these 500 mil users once, you can repeatedly target them, harass them and engage them (or at least try to), but at least there's a shot..... With a website, you only get one shot. A user can visit, checks it out, doesn't like it and he'll scoot.
On a website, visitors come for only 2 reasons. They have some actions that have to be taken on the website OR they come looking for information. Visits attributed to actions to be taken are a safe bet, but around 90% of the time, these visits will be from repeated visitors. When unique visits drop (a very dangerous sign), this can mean that either the Website is not Search Engine Optimized or the content just simply sucks...

But people visit facebook for a multitude of reasons & actions to be performed. Where a site admin fits into this orgy of information depends on how he/she can attract the target and retain users. (with content, updates, contests, prizes, etc.)
Once a fan, you will have your repeated visitor, and using this fan, you can effortlessly generate virgin traffic and drive 'virgins' to your page/tab/group, etc, etc, etc
Doing this with a website,  can more often be very difficult even with all the social bookmarking tools.

You can also send bulk emails to your Fans for FREE and if you want to buy targeted ads you can do that too.

With all this in your favor with Facebook – Why would any business need a website anymore?

Facebook tabs - Developing a Tab Internal Website

You can actually develop a mini 'tabbed' website within a Facebook fanpage tab using div ids to make content dynamic. Spent a lot of time researching this and was happy to see the final result. Although my design skills are crappy - I managed to put a few things together.

The only difference in this case I noticed between FBML and HTML (and/or JS) is that the onclick function is replaced by "clicktoshow" & the "clicktohide" attributes. Separating the static portion from the dynamic portion can be quite a tedious job when you try to incorporate image previews (which onclick expand to full view). The code gets a little too huge and the number of ids that have to be set 'to hide' increase exponentially.

All in all, I felt it was a great week for Facebook. All that left is for me to sort out my underdeveloped artistic streak - then maybe it'll be a whole new ball game

Website iframe on Facebook Fan Page Tab

I had been pondering over this issue for quite a while now, as to how can I embed my website into a facebook fan page tab. (Kinda specific isn't it).
I looked around and found a few static iframe apps on Facebook itself - but guess what?? - They are limited trials (paid versions for an iframe app???) - something so functionally simple in HTML been made so complicated on today's most visited social network was truly mind boggling to me.

So i did a little research further and found that although Facebook does not accept the iframe tag in FBML for a page tab, but instead has to be used in an app, then the app has to be added to the Facebook page (and then the tab) - a bit of php, app creation (from a techie friend, of course) and voila - it was finally possible to embed a webpage on a Facebook fan page tab.

I owe this spark to the guy who designed this page called - "Pages Design" on Facebook - he's managed to give a simply amazing look and feel to his fan page

Facebook and banning of publishing rights of Page Admins

Facebook should really make things a little easier for all page admins by making the authentication procedure a little easier.

They give you 3 weeks to authenticate by some nonsense means, and even after providing the required details, they refuse to unblock your publishing rights.

Try to call them, and they do not service customers on their hotline (even paying customers)

They have to try and figure out as to how and deal with these issues before page admins who advertise stop paying for their PPC campaigns on facebook