Last night, Facebook dropped a bomb on social media marketers, small businesses and developers alike: Facebook Pages need to be “authenticated” in order to have landing tabs.
What does this mean?
Any new visitor to your Facebook Page will not able to land on a custom tab, unless your Facebook Page has greater than 10,000 fans or the Page administrator has been working with an ads account representative. The problem with this is that it requires Page administrators to spend money on Facebook ads (and you need to spend a pretty penny to get an account representative), or have a large traffic base to build a large following.
Less than 24 hours later, and after a frenzy of disapproval from the marketing and developer communities, Facebook removed the “authentication†requirement for setting custom landing tabs on Pages.
The following was posted to the Facebook Developer Forum at 10:44am this morning:
Hello,
As of last night, we’ve removed the recently-added authentication requirement for setting custom landing tabs on Pages. The requirement was instituted as part of a Pages quality initiative, and we apologize for the inconvenience this caused to our developer and business community. We are re-investigating the situation, and will not make any further changes without first giving our community standard notice and lead-time.
Thanks for all your feedback,
Matt Trainer
The problem that Facebook continues to inflict upon itself is that they fail to be transparent with their audience regarding changes to their platform/services/privacy. This Facebook Pages incident isn’t the first time Facebook hasn’t acted in a social manner. Also, given that Facebook has more than 400 million active users and it is the 2nd most popular global website (according to Alexa), I’d think Facebook might think twice about doing whatever it pleases and forcing the community to obey its will.
Facebook, like any other social destination site, is not impervious to being abandoned by the community it helped create. Continuing to roll out drastic changes as they please, they may realize this sooner rather than later.