Last week Facebook announced that applications would soon have their application pages upgraded to function like the new public profiles. This morning that functionality went live. For many applications this means another distribution channel for reaching users and encouraging them to return to the application. Some developers had already been promoting existing public profiles for their applications which resulted in millions of fans.
Now they’ll need to figure out a way to merge the two pages. Last week I wrote that this was a major upgrade for applications as empowers developers to keep a conversation with their users. While some applications aren’t in need of a new distribution channel (since they’ve already attracted highly engaged users), many others will need the channel to keep their applications going.
Not all application users are converted into fans however. Users must opt-in to become a fan even after they’ve become a user of any given app. Applications can encourage users to become fans from within their applications though. Along with granting permission to receive emails and publish news feed stories, this is one other action that developers should be encouraging their users to take.
Thankfully for many developers no encouragement is needed. Farm Town for example has attracted close to 200,000 fans without encouraging users to take any action. Many other applications have worked on building their fan base through public profiles and will now be forced to split time between their existing public profile and their application pages. Hopefully Facebook comes up with an effective way to merge the two.
Will you be taking advantage of the new distribution channel?
This is really annoying, they need to give us the ability to merge our “Page” into the application page. Within the last 9 months if you wanted to stay on top of things you were required to go from having a group to a public “page” and now it seems as though it makes more sense if you’re running an app to have just an about page. Too many changes and again we’re at the mercy of FB.
I wonder what happens if you add your application to a tab on your application page.
It will probably still be completely broken the way it is now with adding applications to normal page tabs… but it’d be nice if they actually fixed that.
here not every user is able to see the new layout
@Brian -
What exactly doesn’t work in regards to adding applications to a new tab on normal member profiles? It works perfectly fine for me. Although I do wish we could rename the tabs!
My fans are not receiving the news feeds. Is this functionallity live in the new applications fan page?
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