Back in the day, one of the key components of any Facebook promotion was the “Suggest to Friends…” link on every Facebook fan page. A couple months ago, that link disappeared. Have no fear, there is a solution. You can make your own. I first saw this a few days ago when I was flipping through fan pages and saw that Keystone had implemented something like this. Intrigued, I found the code they used, spent the morning tweaking and testing, and wanted to share how to do this on your page as well.

First – Watch the Video
I’ve recorded a video which is embeded at the top of this post. If you don’t know how to create a custom landing tab, watch this quick video

Second – Copy the Code
Don’t forget, after you paste the code, find the quotation mark 3-4 characters after the word ‘GO’, delete it, and retype it. Just one little fix.
<fb:request-form method="post" action="http://www.facebook.com/YOUR-FAN-PAGE-ADDRESS" type="TEXT FOR SUBMIT BUTTON" invite="false" content="<fb:req-choice url=http://www.facebook.com/YOUR-FAN-PAGE-ADDRESS' label='GO' />“><fb:multi-friend-selector actiontext="TITLE FOR THE TOP OF THE BOX" cols="3" showborder="true" /></fb:request-form>

Third – Customize
If you don’t want the blue border to be shown around the suggest box, change the “showborder=’true'” attribute to ‘false’. You can also add an image at the top if you’d like. If you do and want it to touch the box, add a bottom margin of -3 (style=”margin-bottom: -3px;”) to your IMG tag.

Let me know if you have any questions or if something doesn’t make sense.

UPDATE (3/10/11): Some people are reporting that they get an error when they try to use their suggest to friends box. If that is the case for you, find the ACTION parameter in the code, and replace your normal URL (eg http://www.facebook.com/slopefillers) with a bit.ly shortened version (eg http://on.fb.me/h6lPPf). Should take care of that for you. Not sure why that changes things, but it appears to be a random bug that FB doesn’t plan on fixing.

NOTE: Many thanks to Liberty Mountain for reminding me to remind you that as of March 11, you can no longer work with FBML. Your tabs will still work after that, but you won’t be able to add any then. If you are going to give this a try, do it before March 11.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.