Do you want to add more function and flair to your Facebook page?

Would you like to add storefront, generate leads or promote something special on a Facebook tab within your page?

In this article I’ll reveal Facebook applications that can help you easily add functionality to your Facebook page.

How Do Facebook Apps Work?

Before we get started, let’s review how Facebook apps (also known as custom tabs on Facebook) pages work.

Custom tabs are installed manually on your Facebook page and show up underneath the cover photo. If you’re visiting a page that has more than four tabs, you can click the down arrow on the right side of the tab cover photos to reveal them all.

Custom tabs appear under your cover photo.

 

There are four standard Facebook apps that come with every page—Photos, Events, Videos and Likes—and any other apps you add are created by a third-party developer (not Facebook).

Many of the apps are designed on the app website after you sign up, and then installed later onto your Facebook page when you’re ready.

Things You Should Know

There are a few important details about Facebook apps that will help with your design. The app width is 810 pixels. If you’re going to create graphics that go all the way across the tab, you’ll need to keep the graphic to that width to prevent scroll bars on your tab.

The graphic can be as long as you want it to be, but keep in mind that it should be shorter than around 500 pixels to appear “above the fold” on most computer screens.

You’ll probably also want to design a custom tab cover photo to draw attention to the tab. The dimensions of the tab cover photo are 111 pixels wide by 74 pixels tall.

Also note that some tabs will not appear on mobile devices. Some are “mobile-ready”; meaning they have a separate URL that they direct people on mobile devices to so they can see the content on that custom tab.

If you’ve been out there searching in the blogosphere, you may have come across Welcome Pages, where the content of your Facebook page could be “hidden” until the user clicks the Like button. That function no longer exists, but you can still hide the content of a Tab until someone clicks the Like button.

Hiding part of the content of your custom Tab is called “like-gating” or “fan-gating“, meaning that someone has to like your page (be your fan) before they can see the good content. This can work especially well for contests or sweepstakes on Facebook. By doing this, you can ensure that the person is a Fan before getting access to the contest entry form.

There are a lot of other apps available that provide a variety of features, like easily bringing in your Pinterest boards, running a contest or adding your blog posts.

These apps are more like a blank canvas, where you can do anything you can do on a website by either using custom templates to get you started or custom-designing something from scratch.

Without further ado, let’s dive into the top 8 apps (in alphabetical order) with some notes about each one.

 

 

http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/facebook-apps-for-custom-tabs/