Social Bookmarking – Facebook

I doubt I need to explain to you what Facebook is, but I thought I’d give you some pointers on how you can maximize your Facebook experience while promoting your website at the same time.

Use Facebook to promote your site


If you’ve ever used Facebook to post blogs, you’re already at an advantage. The first thing to know is what each of the different Facebook pages are and how they can further help your cause. There are three types of Facebook pages:

  • Profile Page — This is your standard Facebook profile. If you have an account, this is was you’re already familiar with. Beyond all the normal profile features you get, you can use a profile page to post blogs and events. This tools can be used to submit articles (as blog posts) and showcase this content on you profile wall.
  • Fan Page — I wrote an entire article about how to use a Facebook fan page to advertise and promote your business. Before creating a fan page or even a group page, read it because there are some significant differences between them. A fan page is basically a public profile that you set up for your business and people will become fans of it instead of friends.
  • Facebook Group — A group page is basically the same as a fan page except that you can’t promote it via social ads. Another difference is that Facebook users have to join your group to become a “friend”. Group pages tend to be used more for actual groups such as clubs and organizations.

Blogging tools

Another advantage to using WordPress is that there are many plugins that allow you to post links on your wall that lead back to your blog site automatically. What this means is that if you post an article on your WordPress blog, the plugin will automatically post the link on your profile page.

All of your friends will then be able to see your post with a small introduction of text that describes what the content is about. If you posted any images on the site, it’ll show a thumbnail on Facebook. The top WordPress Facebook plugins:

  • Facebook dashboard widget — This is a simple solution to bring the Facebook data to you. Using the dashboard widgets available in WordPress 2.5 and above, this plugin will process your Friends status updates RSS feed, your posted items feeds and/or your Facebook notifications feed, and add a widget for each to your WordPress admin dashboard. So now you can keep up with whats going on in your friends lives from anywhere without needing to access Facebook!
  • Add to Facebook — This plugin adds a footer link to add the current post or page to a Facebook Mini-Feed. While the plugin is activated a link will appear after the content of the post with the text “Share on Facebook” or the Facebook icon or both. Clicking this link will bring the user to the Facebook site. If the user isn’t logged in they will be prompted to do so. Once logged into Facebook the post will be added to the Mini-Feed of the account.
  • Wordbooker — This plugin allows you to cross-post your blog posts to your Facebook Wall. You can also “cross polinate” comments between Facebook and your Wordpres blog.

    Various options including “attribute” lines and polling for comments and automatic re-posting on edit can be configured.

Facebook ads

Facebook ads works just like Google AdWords where you purchase ad space based on keywords which makes your site visible to a targeted audience. This is a great way to get your business in front of millions of users. I was reading a blog post that showed the 10 rules for advertising on Facebook and I think it’s some of the best information I’ve seen on this topic. Check it out now.

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Web 2.0 – Fan Pages

Fan pages can be any general webpage that is created by yourself or someone else who’s a fan of your site/business, but it this case, we’re talking about Facebook fan pages. I was searching for a straight-up comparison between fan pages and group pages only expecting to find limited information, but I found a blog post over at Search Engine Journal that gave me what I was looking for.

What is a fan page?

Facebook has two options for promoting and networking people with your business, website or blog. You can create a group which is basically a discussion page while pages are like Facebook profiles, but for an entire company. Even if you’re just a one-person show, you might still want to create your own Facebook page. This way, you can still have your personal profile and not have to mix in your business.

The breakdown

This is the informational breakdown chart as found on Search Engine Journal:

Key Feature Facebook Page Facebook Group
“Ugly” URLs No Yes
Hosting a discussion Yes Yes
Discussion wall, and discussion forum Yes Yes
Extra applications added Yes No
Messaging to all members Yes (via updates) Yes (via PMs)
Visitor statistics Yes (“Page insights”) No
Video and photo public exchange Yes Yes
“Related” event creation and invitation Yes No
Promotion with social ads Yes No

My two cents

As I mentioned earlier, setting up a Facebook fan page creates the same functionality as a standard Facebook page, but with the added bonus of being separate from your personal profile. In my case, I decided that I’d operate two blogs–one for my self and one for my business venture. Since this site was automatically posting my new articles to my personal Facebook profile, I can now move them over to the fan page I created and have my personal blog post to my actual profile. Make sense?!

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