The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

Note: This post is the third installment in a series of excerpts from the Insider's Guide To Facebook Pages, a white paper from Clickable. Download the full guide. For help with your Facebook marketing, contact us.

When Facebook Pages were first introduced, advertisers were constrained by the re- quirement to use Facebook’s native capabilities to develop their presence on the site. Increasingly, this led to a homogenization of branded Facebook Pages, with one page looking very much like any other. As Ovi Roatis, Director of Technology at Velocidi explains, “if all Facebook Page and applications look the same, the value proposition goes down.”

The situation today is very different. “With the change of in-page development, you can do nearly everything on a Facebook Page,” says Kelly. The major change to in-page development was the replacement of Facebook Markup Language (FBML) by iFrames in March, 2011.

To most web-savvy readers, iFrames won’t sound like a revolutionary development, but a blast from the past. In the early days of the Web, iFrames were ubiquitous. The most familiar configuration divided pages in three: a sidebar at the left, the main content in the upper right, and a thin footer below. More often than not, they were all scrolling in different directions. It was an unattractive usability nightmare for web browsers, and a maintenance nightmare for webmasters.

After years of being relegated to amateur pages, Facebook has introduced an important new use for iFrames. In the past, marketers needed to either use native Facebook apps or wait for the social network to develop the tools they needed. Worst of all, impatient marketers and developers did whatever they could to get the functionality they needed out of a limited toolset. Roatis at Velocidi explains: “Even without iFrames, developers were hacking the system to make things happen. iFrames allows them to do it with less risk.” In other words, forcing Facebook’s native tools to perform tasks they weren’t built for was much more likely to cause pages to fail than traditional web development.

Essentially, iFrames allow marketers to develop fully customized, interactive content and display it within tabs on their Facebook Page. You have to develop and host the page yourself, as you would with a standard website. You can then use the Facebook Developer Application to integrate the page into Facebook.

Download the full guide.