What can you say in 100 characters?

Facebook recently changed the setting on page tab names, allowing you 100 characters to get your message across rather than the set word or phrase that the application developer decided was suitable.

Below you can see what I have done on some of my tabs – this is on a dummy page that isn’t published in case you think I’m producing an awful looking page!

As you can see above the whole 100 characters are not shown, when you go over 50 characters the tab name appears with … after it and when you hover your mouse over it the whole title appears (as above). 

But what is shown is far more enticing to click on.

Why change your tab names?

• To make them standout from other tabs people see
• To give people a reason to click on them
• To express your brand personality
• To give people a better understanding of what they get if they click
• To promote a product or service

How to Change Your Tab names

1. 1. Go behind your page by clicking on EDIT PAGE
   2. Click on the APPS tab on the left
   3. Find the app you want to change the name of
   4. Click on EDIT SETTINGS under the app
   5. Change the name in the box that pops up
   6. Click SAVE then OKAY and you are done!

Unfortunately, not all tab names can be changed – it seems to be that the ones that are official Facebook ones can’t be changed, and a few other random ones.  The only way to find out is to try, if you don’t get a name box then you can’t do it.

It is worth changing your tab names, and experimenting with different names – you could even have the same tab on the page twice with different names and see which one get the most clicks by looking at your Facebook insights. 

Now I’m not suggesting that you do this all the time, but initially it would give you some ideas as to whether people are more likely to click if it says Free X or just X.

The other thing to look at is the order of your tabs, on this trial page I have set up I have a crazy number of tabs, but it is only the first 8 tabs that are seen without clicking on MORE.  Therefore those top 8 are the ones most likely to be clicked on, so make sure that they are the most important ones for you.

Has anyone tried a tab name that works fantastically well?  I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.