Cerebra

Following the recent changes to the Facebook Timeline, our reporting for clients started showing a serious drop in visits to tabs, as well as actual tab stats showing lower engagement than previous campaigns B.T. (Before Timeline)

Below is a timeline versus tab view for one of our clients, which is also co-incidentally one of the largest fan pages in South Africa. This trend is mirrored on all of the other pages we manage.

Stats on other pages show Tab views not growing at all with fan growth
- Page X Tab (Sep 2011) 2,658 views with 4,564 fans
- Page X Tab (June 2012) 1,146 views with 7,650 fans

For a strategist and social media manager out there, I’d keep a few things in mind;
1. How much are you spending on Tab development? Considering the amount of traffic to these tabs are you really getting a return on your investment?
2. Considering the huge dip in tab views, and South Africa’s strong access to Facebook via Mobile, I would invest that money into content curation for mobile and excellent community management.
3. You now have an even harder job to create engagement around content that would naturally live on a tab.
4. Facebook advertising is needed to really increase the traffic to tabs. Clever move by Facebook.