How To Create A Custom Facebook Welcome Page

If Facebook is a part of your marketing plan, creating a welcome page can help you boost “likes”, increase interest and offers a great opportunity for brand positioning. Here’s how you do it:

1. Decide on your welcome page strategy. Do you want to use it to establish your brand position? To encourage visitors to check out your website, Twitter feed or other social networking opportunities? To show a video? To promote an introductory teleclass? Or to promote a book or specific product? All of these strategies are strong approaches, but you need to choose one before launching into the project so that you know what your end goal is.

2. Write your copy. Create any promotional or positioning copy that you’d like to include on the page. Remember, the space available is not large, so keep it succinct.

3. Design the graphics. Design your welcome page graphics to match your brand. You can use a design tool like Photoshop or an online tool like Pagemodo. When you design, keep in mind that the width of the image should be 520px.

4. Code it! You’ll need to code your page if you’ve designed it using Photoshop. Facebook uses its own little language called Facebook Markup Language (FBML), but it’s incredibly close to HTML for Welcome Page purposes. You’ll also need to upload the images associated with your graphics to your web host and use those URLs to link to the images in your code.

5. Install it. This portion has a couple of steps:

1. Install Static FBML on your Facebook page:
   • Login to your Facebook account & Search for Static FBML
   • Then click on the tab Add to My Page & Select the page.
2. Click on Edit Page and go to your FBML application.
3. Click Edit. You’ll get a popup window asking for a box title (Welcme is common) and the code (copy and paste your code here)
4. Save and you’re finished!