Last Sunday, it was suggested by one of the members at my website, http://www.woodburner.com, that I setup a page on Facebook for The Woodburner. I thought it was a good idea, but did not know how to go about it. The member and I both did some research, and she led me in the right direction. I’m already ‘friends’ with several members on The Woodburner, so I thought maybe more would be interested.
Setting up the page is straight-forward. If you also have a Facebook identity, you set up the page under your own ID, and it creates its own entity. Basically the page is like a Profile page, with all the capabilities of a Profile page.
However, now that I had a page for The Woodburner, I had to fill it up. That was more of a challenge. Can’t have a page on Facebook for others to ‘Be A FAN of The Woodburner’ and have it be empty. So I created some content: we are in the middle of the 10th anniversary event, so that went up. I had a video for the event, so I loaded that. Then filled in the additional information on the website. But it still looked a bit empty.
I then did a search and found a good application that allows you to put a feed on your Facebook page. There you go! Content right from the website. People could then comment on it and that would be good. Setting it up wasn’t too bad. Making it look good was another story. After spending serveral hours on it, I finally had what I thought was a good start. Oh, for those of you who are interested, that application is called ‘Social RSS’; and it works great!
The one catch to the application is that at first you should set the time between feeds to the lowest, 30 minutes. Otherwise you will have to wait hours to get content rolling in. Once I got the initial feed, I then set it to a more reasonable number of hours. Didn’t want to overwork my server.
Of course you can’t have a Facebook page for your site unless you let those who visit your site that you have a Facebook page. That means adding the ‘Fan of The Woodburner’ code to the website. Getting the code to work wasn’t too bad. The hard part was making it match the website colorations and fonts. To find that information I actually had to search the developers forum on Facebook concerning that code. I got lucky – someone on there had the similar problem, and someone knew what css tags to use to get the Facebook code to respond. So I downloaded that css, updated it for what I use on The Woodburner, and now it’s working great!
The Fan code allows you to set 3 items on your website: The FAN button (gotta have that), a list of Fans (that’s nice), and a feed from your Facebook page. Well, since my Facebook page was just all feeds from The Woodburner, I didn’t want to feed them back, so I blocked that part of the code. Maybe later if interesting things occur on the Facebook page, I’ll turn it back on (and everyone at the website will know what they are missing.)
The only ‘problem’ is that The Woodburner page is not linked from my regular Facebook page. I create links for it, but it’s not very visible. I think the reason Facebook does this is so it can get advertising dollars for you to advertise your page on Facebook. You’ve seen those click to be a FAN ads. That’s why they do it. But anyway people from the site now knows it’s there, and that’s the main point anyway.
Once I created the page I sent it to a few friends I had on Facebook that were also associated with the website. That made 4. Now The Woodburner Fan page on Facebook has about 14 FANs, so I think we are making progress. Maybe something good will come out of it. We will see.
Oh, since I found that feed app, I decided to feed this site into my main Facebook account. That app does a great job of doing that, and it looks good also. Now my friends on Facebook can also visit me here if they like. That linking feed area is actually more highly visible that the link to The Woodburner page. Go figure! It’s all abut the dollar!
Well, that’s all I have for now. If you need to know how to make the Facebook FAN code work for you, let me know and I can send you the css file – you won’t get it from Facebook!!!
Have a good day!
Ralph
