Facebook features

How to add External Links to Facebook Page Tabs?

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I figured a way to add External Links to my Facebook Page – In this blog-post I’ll share how I did that. It’s not a native feature and I have resorted to a third-party app to get this functionality. Here’s the Blog-Post:

This is how my Facebook page Tabs looks after I completed the process.

paras doshi faecbook page google plus twitter

You can see it is linked to my Blog, Twitter and Google+ from my Facebook page tab.

Before we start. you should have the proper admin permissions to install app to a Facebook page as we are going to use a third-party app for this blog-post. Here are the steps involved:

1)  https://www.facebook.com/iframehost > click on Go to App that’s right besides like button > click on “install page tab”

2) select the Facebook Page and click on add page tab

3) Authorize Tab application (review the permission requests before agreeing)

4) Can you see the Tab Settings Page?

add external link facebook pages tab settings

*NGO XYZ is just a page that I created to show this. Ignore the phrase when you see that.

5) I want to redirect it to say twitter.com/paras_doshi.

So following are the settings that I chose:

Tab Name: Twitter

Page Source: redirect

And I entered the URL that It will get redirected to:

twitter paras doshi social media

6) I am going to leave other choice as default for now. You could explore it for advanced options like “this tab will only be visible to your fans and invisible to your non-fans” among other things.

click on Save Settings.

7) Can you see the new tab?

new tab twitter external link via facebook page

8) Test it!

9) Come back on your page. Now – Don’t you want to change the Image? Yes? Go to Edit settings for this Tab:

how to edit settings of facebook page tab

10) click on “change” for custom tab image. And Now, upload the custom image.

When done – come back to your page. Can you see it? yes? Great!

external link to twitter on facebook page

11) To add more Tabs. click on this tab as “page administrator”

when prompted about “Do you want to be redirected?”. click on cancel

click on settings from the admin tab options.

and another tab:

add multiple external links on facebook page tabs

Limit seems to 10 tabs.

And once you click on “HTML Page Tab #n”, then you’ll have to repeat the steps about configuring the settings for this tab.

That’s about it!

Conclusion:

If you want your Facebook page to point to your (or your organizations) presence on other social media networks – then now you know how you can add external links and point your Facebook page fans to Google+, Twitter, Website, Blog among other things.

 

Are there any other cool facebook page techniques that you now of, I’ll be glad to learn about it – Please do post it in the comment section (along with your facebook page url! )

 

Related Articles:
1. Social Media Analytics. Facebook Page Smackdown: Status updates vs Images?
2. Five things I learned about “Art of report designing” from Facebook insights.

Five things I learned about “Art of report designing” from Facebook insights.

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As you may know, I have a Facebook page for this blog – only because NOT all my friends (on Facebook) want to follow my technology-related activities. But some of them are interested, and so I thought of setting up a Facebook page for the blog which helps those interested in following my twitter (micro-blogging) and blog feed via Facebook.

Now, Facebook provides a nice tool called “Facebook Insights” to view performance of the page, optimize content, among other things. A sample report looks like this:

facebook insight for paras doshi's blogI liked the way they have designed this “line chart” and I thought about what I can learn about “Art of report designing” from this nicely designed report.

Here’s what I liked about the report:

1. Key performance indicators (KPI)

kpi in facebook insights2. “?” (more details) on every “jargon” (term) that CLEARLY explains what each term means.

3. it’s easy to compare “people talking about it” vs “weekly total reach” metric which are inter-dependent in nature.

Now to know why comparing these two metric makes sense, read this:

The next metric, “People Talking About This”, indicates how many people are actually talking about your business to their friends. This metric includes everyone who:

  •  Liked your Page
  • Liked, commented on, or shared your Page post
  •  Answered a Question you’ve asked
  •  Responded to your event
  •  Mentioned your Page
  •  Tagged your Page in a photo
  •  Checked in or recommended your Place

Getting more people to talk about your business allows you to reach more people. You can see how many people your Page is reaching by looking at the “Total Reach” metric.

Source: http://ads.ak.facebook.com/ads/FacebookAds/Page_Insights_en_US.pdf

The report makes it easy for us to “compare” these inter-dependent metrics.

4. The size of the circle depends on the “number of posts”. Very intuitive!

The size of circle depends on numebr of facebook postsThey could have easily opted for “other” formats but they opted for this and to me, it is very intuitive to interpret the report.

5. Horizontal Axis Format for Dates:

Keep interval to 7 for axiskeeping the Interval to “7” looks better! It looks clean!

So, Those were my 5 favorite things about that report

Now, One can export the data too in csv and .xls format! That means, that you can create custom report on top on this data to answer any business question that you may have.

So for instance, I asked myself – Is there a relation between “number of posts i shared” with “People talking about it”. Although this question got answered via the sample report I shared earlier – But I wanted to extend it. Here’s why: The “number of posts” metric was reflected by the “size of the circle” and “people talking about it” metric was reflected in line chart format. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if both values were reflected on a line chart in a coherent fashion? I thought so, and so I downloaded the data on my computer and opened it in excel. And I was quickly created this line chart in excel:

paras doshi's blog on facebookBingo! I learned that more I post on my Facebook page => more likes,shares I am going to generate. Now this is NOT a universal statement, it varies from page to page but at least, my data encourages me to post more on my Facebook page.

So that’s about it. In this blog post, I listed things I liked about Facebook insights and what I learned about “Art of report designing”. Then I extended the data made available to create a custom report on excel. After all, “Information is king“.