Facebook tonight launched an upgrade to Pages that will be welcome
news to businesses and marketers. It’s now easy
to add custom Flash or
HTML (FBML) to your Facebook Page.
In order to add Flash and FBML capabilities to your Page, install
the “Flash Player” or “Static FBML” apps. Adding the Flash Player will
allow you to upload your own Flash files to your page, while adding the
Static FBML app will allow you to enter your own HTML. This will allow
Pages to provide much more customized experiences.
In addition, Facebook added a Legal Drinking Age setting to Pages.
If you operate a page related to alcohol products or bars, you can now
meet legal drinking age requirements by editing your settings to only
allow your page to be fully accessible by those over the legal drinking
age where they live.
Finally, Facebook added the Photos module to Pages so that Page owners can allow fans to upload photos.
All in all, these changes make Pages a more comprehensive product
for marketers reaching Facebook users through this channel. While
apparently growing slowly, Pages will become an increasingly important
marketing vehicle on Facebook over time - especially as the volume of
fan-endorsed Social Ads continues tAs you may already know, Facebook pushes new updates to the Platform
almost every Tuesday night. Inside Facebook will cover every change to
the Platform that’s relevant to developers and marketers. Yesterday’s release included the following updates:
Facebook has now completely removed the actor_id parameter from
feed.publishTemplatizedAction. Now, passing in an actor to templated
feed
items will have no effect. This means that “passive” feed items
(feed items published for a user not actively causing the feed item to
be sent) will no longer work correctly.Facebook added the ability to dynamically use the appropriate
possessive pronouns in feed items according to a person’s gender. This
means that developers can now use “his” and “her” in feed items. For
example, “{actor} updated <fb:pronoun uid=”actor” possessive=”true”
useyou=”false”/> status.”