If you have a business fan page on Facebook and have been considering hopping on the Facebook Places bandwagon, there’s something you should know. Associating your fan page to a “place” will completely change the layout of your fan page.
AllFacebook.Com published an article back in August about how Facebook fan page managers can create or claim their physical location “place”, but they didn’t put a lot of emphasis on what claiming that address does to your fan page.
According to the AllFacebook.Com article, the process is a quick three-parter:
- Step 1: Create or claim your place
- Step 2: Claim the place as yours
- Step 3: Merge your place and your page
They even show you screenshots of what your page will look like afterwards, but unless you’re paying attention, it might be easy to gloss over that part.
Before you associate your Facebook fan page to a place, your tabs look something like this along the top:
After you associate your fan page to a place, the tabs disappear from the top and are moved, inelegantly at best, to the left-side rail, like this:
This looks particularly ugly if you use a lot of Static FBML tabs, since the tab’s app icon is used in that left-rail navigation.
If you’ve been using Facebook places for your fan page for a while, this is nothing new to you. If you’ve been on the fence about whether or not to associate a physical place with your fan page, make sure you consider the layout changes in your decision. Facebook apparently has a no-backsies policy on this, and since they don’t make it a point to warn page owners that this will bonk their layout, it has caused some distress.
There is a petition going around to ask Facebook to change this, but anyone who has worked with Facebook for more than 5 minutes knows that probably won’t help. Based on the screenshots from August. this issue has been a problem since then, and Facebook has done nothing to try to correct the issue since, so I wouldn’t hold my breath if I were you.
Big thanks to Ryan Dean of the Wadsworth Public Library for bringing this layout change to our attention.
