ThruSocial, a do-it-yourself Facebook tab creation service, offers an ample collection of widgets and Facebook layouts that will enhance your Facebook fan page. However, when evaluating its Pro service, we were unable to publish our tab into the Facebook application, even after several attempts. When we contacted its customer service department, we didn't receive a response for days. And even when we did, customer service was not able to assist us.
We were unable to post the tab on Rover's Pet Treats, the page we created to evaluate thruSocial. And we were unable to post it on any of our other evaluation pages. ThruSocial had us identify the page to which we would be publishing our tab prior to entering its design interface, but when we were ready to publish, the service did not provide the option to publish to that page. Rover's Pet Treats did not appear in its scroll-down list. We were unsuccessful when we tried to publish to our other pages, as well. Instead, an additional tab appeared on the page with an error message.
Despite the problems we experienced in trying to publish our tab, we are impressed with thruSocial's features. ThruSocial lets you create an unlimited number of tabs for an unlimited number of Facebook pages. It provides multi-layer designs with some clip art, although for best results, you should provide your own images. The service enables you to add hotspots, or hyperlinks, to images in your design. You can also add hyperlinks to text.
ThruSocial provides Facebook templates with clip art, or you can choose to begin with a blank page, which we did when evaluating the service. ThruSocial provides tools for creating reveal-page content, or two sets of content – one that displays to non-fans, and another that may only be seen when you click on the Like button at the top of the Facebook page.
ThruSocial also offers a wide range of business-savvy widgets that you can add to your page, including the ability to add a YouTube video, a Twitter feed or an RSS feed of your blog. It provides tools to build custom forms or to run a poll or contest on your Facebook page. You can also easily add a map or background music.
ThruSocial's design interface is not initially intuitive. In our attempt to build a reveal tab, we shuffled between its numerous steps to locate the features we were looking for. But the interface got stuck, so we had to start a new template. Still, we were unable to publish a tab during our evaluation of thruSocial.
Although you don't need to know how to program to use thruSocial, knowledge of basic Photoshop functions is very helpful for using this service.
ThruSocial's website offers a contact form and an email address to reach a member of its support team. A member of its customer service staff responded to our inquiry within 24 hours. ThruSocial's website provides a section with answers to frequently asked questions along with tutorials. It also provides a public forum.
Despite thruSocial's features and extensive package of widgets, its interface experienced some glitches during our evaluation process, and we were unable to publish a tab to our Facebook fan page after several attempts. We hope the problems we experienced are flukes that thruSocial can easily remedy.
