Facebook’s migration to iframe only landing pages presents great opportunities

Last month the ever-changing Facebook decided that they were going to depreciate FBML – FaceBook Markup Language – and encourage developers to create applications that stream their html/css through an iframe. While Facebook’s constant changes to its platform can be frustrating to social media marketers – this change forces us to up our game and design more interactive and creative landing pages.

It is well known that the Facebook landing page is a major key to getting traction, in terms of “likes,” on Facebook pages. For those unfamiliar with the concept – FB allows page owners to create their own pages where you can display images, links, and text prompting your visitors to action. The old way of doing this was to create the page within Facebook using FBML – which was really just HTML hosted on Facebook’s servers. Facebook decided they no longer want to be in the hosting business – so page owners must now develop their landing page on their own server space and link it through and iframe to Facebook. You get the iframe to work on your Facebook page by registering as a Facebook Developer and creating a new application. An important note to consider –  you will need to have a valid SSL certificate installed on your hosting service as Facebook utilizes HTTPS to access the page.

Creating a page in this manner does take a little more time than simply banging out some HTML, inserting it in Facebook and calling it FBML – but the opportunities are limitless with the new iframe methodology. Essentially, a developer can now create and entire mini-website inside of Facebook. You can develop the site with whatever technologies your wish to deploy, html, css, php, JavaScript, etc, because its all running from your hosting – not Facebook. You can see an example of a mini-website that Omega Point created here. You can play audio, include email signup forms, display a checkout system to sell products – essentially anything that you can do on your website – just in a smaller frame.  (There are ways to overflow the height so that you can exceed 800px without scrollbars, but I suggest designing to Facebook’s iframe specifications to ensure a consistent clean look).

There is a lot of potential in the iframe methodology and I encourage you to take it for a test drive. And why limit yourself to static pages? A CMS template designed to the Facebook iframe specs could be a powerhouse Facebook mini-website.

If you are interested in Facebook page custom design please contact Omega Point Design at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .