Adding an Opt-in Form to Your Facebook Business Page
Posted by Dave McCue on September 18th, 2012
When the “Timeline” layout of Facebook was extended to business pages, marketers were left to figure out a way to make their pages effective in spite of the new (and in many cases, unwanted) changes. One approach that continues to be effective is adding an email sign-up form to your Facebook business page. In order to do this, a custom tab must be added to your page, at which point you can place your email sign-up form directly into your new tab.
Here is a step-by-step guide to implementing an email sign-up form on your Facebook page that will add new recipients directly to your SubscriberMail account. If you plan to follow along with the steps, make sure you’ve already logged in to a Facebook account that has administrative rights over the Business Page you want to modify.
1) A Facebook app must be installed on your page in order to create custom tabs. In this example, we’ll use My Tab. Just select “Add App to Page” from the dropdown menu.
2) After installing MyTab, you’ll see a placeholder tab on your page.
3) Navigate to the “Edit Page” area and select Apps. Select “Edit Settings” for the MyTab app to give your new tab a name and swap in a new image to replace the default MyTab image on the tab. 
4) From the Edit Page > Apps screen, select “Go to App” next to MyTab and select your page from the page list (if you have more than one page that you administrate). Click the “Edit Tab Content” button to begin entering your content. To include an email sign-up form from SubscriberMail, simply go to the Opt-in Code Generator under the “Settings” menu in your SubscriberMail account and customize your form however you see fit. Once generated, simply copy and paste the sign-up form code into your Facebook tab. 
5) Your customized tab should now be visible on your business page, and will display your email sign-up form when clicked. 
6) To add additional tabs, simply go back to the Edit Page > Apps > Go to App area of MyTab and select “More Apps” – this will allow you to install additional custom tabs. 
7) Facebook’s default tabs display in front of your custom tabs. To modify this and bring more visibility to your custom tabs, click the “edit” icon on any of your tabs and use the “swap position with” option to change the order of tabs on your page. 
To see an example of custom tabs in action, check out the Harland Clarke Digital Facebook page.
thank you so much, it was tricky but I did it…..whew!
Great, glad to hear it :-)
How can I specify which list the addresses populate? When generating the opt-in script I don’t want to give people signing up a choice of lists to chose from. I have multiple Facebook pages and want the people who sign up on each page to go to a corresponding list.
Thad: Thanks for writing! There is a way to customize a “hidden” list tied to each opt-in form. Please contact our Support team at 630-303-5000, option 2 or support@harlandclarkedigital.com and we can walk you through this easy process.
I see. So, when choosing the list I want, instead of putting a check in the column on the left, I check the box to the right by the word “hidden.” Makes sense now. Thanks for your help.