Can You Change an App Thumbnail on a Personal Facebook Profile?

While this blog mainly focuses on how bloggers and business professionals can use social media sites to stand out, and thus focus on Facebook Fan Pages vs. personal profiles, I received a question from a frustrated Facebook profile user: How can you change application thumbnails on a profile, not a page? So I wanted to shed some light on this issue.

Unfortunately, you cannot customize the application thumbnails on personal Facebook timeline profiles. You can only do so on Facebook Fan Pages.

On Facebook profiles, you only have the ability to make the following customizations:

1. Re-order your applications

Hover over the app image you want to reorder and click the pencil icon, and choose an app to swap positions with:

2. Add new applications

Hover over an empty app tab and click the + sign:

3. Remove applications from your “favorites”

Hover over the app image you want to remove and click the pencil icon, then click Remove from Favorites:

Fan pages are given much more flexibility with their customization options because they’re primarily used for business purposes. Facebook trying to keep businesses happy so that they’ll continue investing in Facebook ad buys. If businesses didn’t have complete control over their branding, and weren’t allowed to customize any image on a fan page, that wouldn’t make them very happy, which might influence their Facebook ad spend.

As Personal profiles are meant for connecting with friends. People with personal profiles are the audience for the businesses buying the Facebook ads and creating the applications. Those businesses want their app logos displayed on your page, so it seems that Facebook is going to do what keeps the ad buyers happy.

At least, that’s my theory. Have a theory of your own? Feel free to theorize or rant away in the comments below.

Disclaimer: Yes, I’d consider myself a Facebook marketing expert, but I do not work at Facebook, and have no control over these features.