Guys, I was doing simple research, to finish my post on how to add a “Share” and “Like” button to your Facebook Fan Page Landing. The Landing Page, widely known as a great tool for all on Facebook, to promote a service, product or company, to use as an incentive is no longer a free feature! — Update, this was also very quickly reversed and the posts I read of people still having the problem seems to be a bug and NOT a policy change. So for the time being there is no need to worry. But seeing as this is the second time Facebook attempts to change the policy, I think it’s still good to consider some points, in the event of a REAL policy switch.

Let’s say they do change the policy at a later time that commercializes the use of a landing page and this would require you to use Facebook ads.

Though that would be saying goodbye to the idea of using a Facebook Fan Page as your website at no extra cost other than time and a cool design for your Landing Page. In all honesty, is it logical to think that we are to get front row access to all the consumers possible for absolutely nothing?

In any case, having an online ad campaign can be very beneficial, but it’s not what you want to do when your Fan Page is about a hobby or a small starting business and you feel you do not have the budget for this.

I’d like to be very clear about this: I have Facebook Ads and I’ve paid $18 for a 5 day campaign. I set the limit and walked away. I just wanted to run a test, and feel the water. Hurray for me!

I tested the water for the ads campaign, and doubled my fan base in 5 days. I know these are small results, but I am targeting a much smaller pool of people: ARUBA. So in all fairness, those are pretty good results (from 60 to 139)!

So the benefits of doing the ads campaign anyway and keep your landing page are quite evident;

1. Increased TARGETED exposure.
2. Bigger Fan Base.
3. Your target group sees your ad and may become more familiar with you and your services.
4. You can make the ad be the initial hook, so you can incentive the hell out of every visitor to your landing.
5. No extra effort on your part. How many hours would you need to be suggesting and sharing your page manually in the hopes that your new pool of friends and twitter followers click the link? Five, ten a month? How much would you get paid for using that time doing work for a client? Do the math, it will take loads off you.

Another detail I noticed is that when you manage multiple Fan pages all of them keep the feature even though you are only sending out ads for one of them. What does this mean? If you do this for various customers and manage then under one single account, you’re not as much in trouble as the guys that manage the Fan Pages under separate accounts. Although we will not know what the rules of the game will be at the time this become a real situation.

But in the spirit of small businesses; This would really suck! Because it’s gonna demand some real hustle to get to 10.000 fans (that’s over 10% of the Aruba Population), and for those who already invested in a kick ass CSS landing page and would then be unable to use it unless that drop $10 a month, I say this subscription-like deal really really sucks (nearly as much as hosting fee’s)!

Since we all know that Social Media is important but also still in it’s early stages I really think that Facebook would be pull one over on us all with this one, unless of course they improve the targeting features of their Ad Campaigns.

I hope they do this when their ads are tracked better and the information they gather when people close and remove the ad is actually accessible to me real time. I also hope that in the event that they finally really change this they email us a warning about the upcoming change, giving a heads up and they start building up a good list of reasons to commercialize it further.

It was great to know that the policy switch was reversed and that none of us have to suffer for it, yet.