The Facebook Advertiser Homepage

With the release of Facebook's latest version of Pages for advertisers, the ability to create "custom" tabs was added, as well as the ability to set any tab as the default when people arrive at the page. This has spawned an interesting new phenomenon with advertisers using custom tabs as default "homepages" for their Facebook Pages. There are a couple good examples I've run across in the last week:

Bud Light: http://www.facebook.com/BudLight
 

Volkswagen: http://www.facebook.com/vw

What's interesting to me is that this seems to be the result of a fairly traditional online mindset... that one must create a very "branded" environment. It's as if many of these advertisers are trying to force the "microsite" mentality into the Facebook platform. The argument could be made that these advertisers would be much better off having the page default to the wall, where more credible fan conversations are happening. In addition, at this time, it's more likely that people will find your page through their friends' news feeds then by typing in an advertiser's URL.

So if you're an advertiser, should you create a "homepage" for your Facebook Page? Yes! The platform is new enough, that all advertisers should have an experimental mindset. Try it out, and see what happens. You can always change it..