Right now, in order to get a Facebook custom landing page added or updated you either need to spend a lot of time playing around with FBML or pay someone to build it and make changes. As you can see by these instructions it can be a pretty long process every time you want something changed. Even if you are proficient in FBML, everything is switching over to iFrame as of March 11th so you will have to learn it all over again.

We have built many custom landing pages for our clients and are now making it just a little bit easier for you with our Content Management System app. This app lets you choose a template layout (or have your own designed) and then simply click and type to change text and images. No more coding or messing around.

How it works:

Once you have chosen your layout you can easily swap any of the images by simply uploading the desired image.  You can also set a link  if you would like the image to become a button.

Editing the text is just as easy, simply click on the text you want to edit and start typing.  Any text can be made a link, re-sized or made bold.

Being able to edit things in minutes instead of hours makes it far easier to have weekly or even daily specials in a nice neat design. It makes it simple to change your images out as seasons change, and it stops you from pulling out your hair trying to deal with FBML code.

Here are 2 pages which have already taking advantage of this content management system:

If you are interested in this product, feel free to contact ben@thinksocialmedia.com

Earlier today we got an email from Erin Virtanen who is the Social Media and Events Coordinator at Tourism Victoria. Like many of us, Erin was wondering about the changes Facebook have made to the order of fan page posts.  Posts are now shown in order of level of engagement rather than in chronological order.

For those of you who are not sure what we are talking about, with the new layout Facebook Fan pages now pick out posts that have the most engagment on them (likes & comments) and pushes them above all other posts. While this change does make sense in the fact that if a few people like a post it’s plausible that many others will too, it means that a lot of other interesting posts will be buried and forgotten about.

So as an admin of a page how can you avoid missing posts?  When logging in the first thing you should do is press “Admin View” on the left hand side under the wall button.  Switching to Admin View will show you all post in chronological order and allow you to make sure that peoples questions won’t go unanswered.

Check out my blog post about The New and Improved Fan Page to find out more about Facebook changes, and if you have any questions or concerns feel free to ask us on Facebook or Twitter.

Back in the middle of December Facebook accidentally gave us a sneak peak of things to come for our Fan Pages. Well today they are fully launching the new Pages.  Page admin now have the option to change to the new format or wait until the change is eventually applied to all Pages on March 10, 2011.

So what do these changes mean for you?

Increased Functionality:

1. Ability to talk as a Page

2. Ability to tag Fan Page in images

3. Choice to have push notification sent via email

New Layout

1. Navigation is no longer along the top

2. Edit page button is no longer underneath the profile picture but now in the top right hand corner

3. Width of custom landing pages has been decreased by 20 pixels

Overall the feedback on the new fan pages has been quite positive.  Most admin seem quite pleased with the new functionality except for the additional coding required to fix custom landing pages.  What do you think of all the changes?

If you are an avid Facebook, or just Internet user in general you have probably heard about programs such as Firesheep, that are able to grab your cookies and get log in details on unsecured networks. This prompted some of us to try encryption ad-ons that failed us miserably. So Facebook has taken a giant leap forward in protecting our privacy by offer the option to use a secure HTTPS connection to the server.

Users considered to be most at risk are those who regularly log in from public access computers and unsecured wireless hot spots. If you do regularly use Facebook from any public places then we’d recommend changing to the HTTPS option as soon as you can.

The option to apply HTTPS is in the Account Security area under Account Settings (look for Secure Browsing).

As a consequence of the secure connection, pages may take longer to load than usual. There are also a large number of applications that are not yet compatible with the HTTPS. This just means that you may have to save your Facebook gaming time for when you are at home and on a secure network.