Posts Tagged ‘facebook’

Facebook Fan Box

Friday, April 9th, 2010

If your business has Facebook fans, that doesn’t mean they read your blog. Just because people are reading your blog doesn’t mean they know you’re on Facebook. Wouldn’t it be great if website visitors could easily be converted into Facebook fans? They can, with Facebook Fan Box.

Why would a business, organization, or public personality who already has a blog audience bother with Facebook? While I highly recommend blogs for the incredible content hubs they are, consider how they work. Blogs comprise a 1-to-1 relationship in that one reader can visit and consume the content you create. An individual reader may visit once in a while to see what’s happening and maybe comment on your content. On Facebook, however, fans can receive (content is pushed) blog-length posts and twitter-length status updates which can contain photos, links, and videos directly in their News Feed. You no longer have to rely on readers occasionally dropping by the blog. Content is pushed to them and they can easily comment on it. If they like, share or comment on it, your content ripples out across all of their Facebook friends (the average Facebook user has 130 friends!) as recent activity. This engenders conversation between people and their connections. Facebook is another great enticement for your fans to share and interact with your content.

The Fan Box widget is how you get a fan page out of Facebook and onto the web at large and in turn makes it easy for your blog readers to become page fans and tightens the bond you share with them.

The Fan Box has a few basic options you can select for how you would want it to display:

  • With/without the stream
  • With/without fans (it will display fans you know if there are any)
  • With/without the Facebook logo
Facebook Fan Box Options

A few of the Facebook Fan Box Options

Now, website visitors who are not currently Facebook fans will see a “Become a Fan” button; if you are already a fan it says “You are a Fan”. No matter which Fan Box options you go for, the important thing is that Facebook users now have the option to become a fan of your page right from your website the fan box is embedded on. If gaining fans is your goal, the Facebook Fan Box is a fantastic way to do it.

An example of a Facebook Fan Box on a website

Rock Fire Grille uses the Fan Box on their website to share specials and gather new fans in Facebook.

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Facebook Share

Friday, March 19th, 2010

Facebook Share is a great way to easily share web content into Facebook. If you have content to share, say a blog post, making it easy for others to distribute increases odds it’ll find more eyes. What better place to have people share things than across their vast community of Facebook connections?  With the average user having 130 friends and writing 25 comments on Facebook content each month it’s hard to resist; head over to http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics for more cool stats.

You’ll notice many web pages and especially blog posts now have a Facebook Share button. Share buttons currently come in the following styles with the main options being button or link and with or without the counter.

buttons_on_paper

All four flavors of the Facebook Share button.

Installing Facebook Share is a snap. Just add a few lines of code and you’re in business. To setup your share button, go to http://www.facebook.com/facebook-widgets/share.php and select the type of button you want then paste the code into your page.

Select live counter and it will monitor the number of times your content (the URL) has been shared on Facebook and can include other analytics for the number of shares, “likes”, the number of comments and clickbacks with a few special API calls.

Facebook Share is a marvelous way for anyone to easily share content on Facebook from anywhere on the web.

To try Facebook Share on this page, just click “share” below to pass this blog post on to others by sharing it with your Facebook friends!

For more information on Facebook Share or to setup your own Share button visit: http://www.facebook.com/facebook-widgets/share.php

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