Designing a Facebook Welcome Page – Part Three

This week we’ve been discussing the creative design of making a Facebook welcome page. Yesterday I showed one of the “pieces” of our current Welcome page for our Outskirts Press page on Facebook.  Now let’s talk about the two most important elements of a successful Facebook Welcome page:

1) Understanding Facebook policies as it relates to incentivizing links
2) Graphically showing your visitors exactly what you want them to do when they see your Welcome page on Facebook.

Let’s discuss #1 first: Facebook allows you to incentivize links, provided all new and past friends are eligible to win the same prize/award.  So, for instance, you cannot reward only new “likes” with the offer.  Facebook has a specific posting in their FAQ about this exact topic, which is here: https://www.facebook.com/help/search/?q=free+for+liking+page and it says:

Is incentivizing Liking an app allowed?

Yes, you can provide special rewards to users who Like your app’s page. These rewards must be available to new and existing users. For example, users should not be immediately rewarded for clicking the Like button (i.e., “click here for 10 bonus points” is not permitted). Your messaging should clearly indicate that all users who Like your app/site are eligible to receive the offer or reward (e.g., “Free gifts are available to users who Like our Page” and “Users who Like our app/site are eligible for special offers.”).

 

So anyone who has “liked” your page (before or after the incentive) needs to have the same eligibility for the reward. You cannot just reward the new “likes.”  Easy enough.

 

The second most important part of the welcome screen is showing visitors HOW to “like” you, which is best done with a graphic that is pointing to the actual “Like” button on Facebook. In our case, this is the very top element of our Welcome Graphic:

 

 

Again, just like the graphic I showed you yesterday, this graphic element looks a little odd all by itself, and that’s because the full graphic has been “cut-up” to accommodate both faster loading and more efficient manipulation when we want to update elements of the welcome page.  Then we put it all back together in HTML. Don’t worry, all this will come more into focus as we continue putting the pieces into place… and we will continue that next time…