Facebook Page Like Redirect

We encountered some pretty nasty Facebook behavior late last night during a launch. Usually when you “Like” a page, the iframe application refreshes normally. However, if your application is the page’s default tab, the on “Like” redirect goes back to the wall. Apparently this is by design. There is a bug report filed, which states

“Once a user Likes a page, by design, the landing page for future visits will be the Wall tab. Thanks for the report.”

This is not what you’d expect – since it only appears to happen when the application is the default tab. I’d expect it would always redirect back to the tab you had open. They can still satisfy their above quote this way.

We couldn’t come up with any fixes, but found a few workarounds:

  • Don’t use it as the default tab
  • Point your marketing material to the actual tab and not the generic page URL

I also came up with a potential solution the next morning, which should work, though not tested:

  • Add some JS code (pseudocode): if window.top.href == ‘generic page URL’, set window.top.href = ‘page URL with specified application tab’

Hope this helps someone!