As soon as Facebook introduced the Timeline for pages in March 2012, many experts were quick to write off the future of Facebook Landing Pages; but one year hence, Facebook Landing Pages are still relevant for businesses.
In my last article about Facebook Landing Pages, I walked you through the process that we used to create LeadSquared’s Facebook Landing Page. Today I would discuss with you the reasons why Facebook Landing Pages are still a worthwhile investment of your effort.
1) You can Use them for Lead Capture from Facebook Ads
Even though you cannot set a static landing page anymore, you can create customized landing page apps with their own URLs. This allows you to create a form for lead capture and insert it in a Facebook custom app. You can set this URL as the landing page in your Facebook ads (make sure that the ad copy and landing page are congruent). This is a screenshot of ours:
Why use a Facebook Landing Page for this?
You may ask, “Why go through all the pain of using an app to import a landing page to Facebook, when I can link the Facebook ads directly to an external landing page?” Good point; you definitely have an option of doing that. However, if you consider the following point, you would understand why using a landing page on Facebook itself would be a better choice:
Familiarity counters skepticism
Using custom tabs would allow you to have your landing page within Facebook’s interface. Instead of navigating away to a website or a standalone-landing page on ad-click, you are giving the visitors a form to fill on Facebook itself; this would give the visitors a feel that they are in familiar terrain.
Familiarity has a major selling point. When people are on one platform (Facebook, in this case), they are skeptical of navigating to a second one to provide their information. Work this skepticism to your advantage, rather than losing to it.
This point is directly derived from the most basic landing page best practice: Try to make your landing page similar in appearance to your website, so that the users don’t have a disconnected feeling, when they reach your landing page on clicking a link on your website. Here your visitor is originally on Facebook, so let him be on Facebook itself, when you direct him to a form.
2) Like Gating
This is more a feature of Facebook Custom tabs, than Facebook Landing Pages, but there is just a thin line, isn’t it. There is nothing like this, if your aim is to increase the number of Likes on your Page.
Why would I want to do this?
Let us suppose you want to increase your page likes. (You may be do this by running Facebook ads ‘or’ by sending traffic organically to your Facebook page from your website, YouTube Channel etc).
Where are you landing the Page Visitors: on your TimeLine, a custom landing page, where?
If you were running a campaign to collect the lead details, a Facebook landing page without a like gate would do, because your aim is not to get likes, but the visitor details. However, now your intent is different: You want Likes. This is where FanGating would help you immensely:
i) To Offer your visitors an incentive for liking you:
You can offer your visitors an incentive for liking your page, for instance, access to follower only content. For instance, if you are an education institute offering video lectures for IIT JEE aspirants, this is what a powerful incentive would look like:
When the students (target customers) know that just a ‘Like’ away is a lot of content relevant to them, they would not hesitate in ‘liking’ your page.
ii) You would get relevant likes this way:
This would also ensure that only relevant people “like” your page. Otherwise, many times you get a lot of junk traffic using Facebook campaigns (even after setting all the filters right). This traffic might look good on the surface, but will not really do you very good, as these people would never really interact with you, nor do they have any interest in what you offer.
We have seen that such ‘Likers’ often end up ‘unliking’ your page, once you get really active on Facebook; because your updates would start showing up in their feeds, and they are simply not interested.
Setting a Fan Gate on such campaigns, (allowing them access to specific content if they like your page), would help you filter people who might not be of interest to you.
For instance, only students preparing for IIT JEE or their relatives/friends would want access to ‘400+ video lectures’ in the above example, right; rest of the visitors would not be interested. So instead of garnering junk “likes”, you are making a choice to have only relevant people “like” you.
iii) In case of Traffic from Referral Sites:
The above argument holds true even when you send traffic from external sources to your Facebook page. (The external source may be your YouTube Channel, your website, or some community on Facebook itself). The traffic generated this way is free, unlike the CPC or CPM ads. Therefore you can be choosy about the kind of fans you want on your page, without feeling guilty about it.
Check out the image below; a like gate with a message ‘Like Us to Get B2B Marketing Tips’ would attract a B2B Marketer, and would not be of much importance to the others; thus getting you only relevant traffic.
Some Common Arguments against Like Gating
i) Facebook’s Ads are CPC; why put another roadblock in visitors’ way by enabling like gating?
This is the most obvious argument, because Facebook has 2 cost models for ads: CPC (Cost Per Click), and Cost Per Mille (Another form of ‘Cost Per Impression’, where 1000 Impressions = 1 Mille). People feel that when they are paying Facebook for the clicks or impressions, why make it more difficult for people to get to the page, by enabling a like gate. I would agree with this argument if the intent of our campaign was lead detail capture.
But no, we are trying only to get new ‘likes’ here.
Do you think you are making it easy for visitors if you land them on your timeline? Maybe; but don’t you think that a disinterested visitor would bounce off from the timeline, no matter how easy you make it for him/her. Similarly, though an interested visitor would like the page from the timeline (even without any added incentive), but access to follower-only content would definitely act as a motivating factor.
ii) The visitor would miss the ‘About’ section, thus might be discouraged from ‘liking’ the page
You can customize the like gate by adding sufficient information about your product/page, if you are worried that by directing the visitor to a like gate, you are not allowing him to see your ‘About’ section (which is otherwise available on the timeline). This would allow the visitor to know whatever he wants to before liking you.
How would I create a FanGate?
- Multiple tools allow you to do this for a price; however, a few others give the feature free. Read this article first, and you would know, where to find the Fan Gate option, if you are using ThunderPenny’s Static HTML (and it is free in this case).
- This message is customizable. In the example above, I have chosen to use ThunderPenny’s default fan gate. All I did was change the message text. There is an editor to help you change the colour, font etc of the text. You can even choose an app to create a fangate. This can be an image or any other app that ThunderPenny provides (If you have read the article I mentioned before, you would know, what options are available to you. If you haven’t, read it here).
3) Multiple tools to create Facebook Landing Pages with ease
Another reason you should use Facebook Landing Pages, is because you CAN, and with great ease (with minimal time and effort). Several third party applications allow you to create awesome things like Contests, Sweepstakes, Maps and other custom landing pages with (absolutely) no effort, and (many times) no cost. Here are a few of them:
- ThunderPenny’s static HTML: This is the one that I used to import LeadSquared’s Landing page to a Facebook tab. It provides the most basic options of creating static iFrame tabs free.
- PageModo
- ShortStack
- Heyo
Most of these allow you to customize your Facebook business page completely with great ease, in addition to the most basic (contact form or Facebook landing page design) feature. There are multiple other applications too, and I would list them out for you along with their detailed features soon. Stay tuned for that.
