How To Add Facebook Social Plugins To Your WordPress Blog

May 13, 2010 by 4 Comments

Facebook Social Plugins

After seeing the latest Social Plugins from Facebook I was testing out a few ways to integrate them on my wordpress blog. As a result of these investigations I would like to share a couple of useful resources to save you the time and effort of hunting this stuff down.

Simple Facebook Connect

This is a great wordpress plugin created by Otto. It basically consists of a Base plugin that configures you blog to interact with Facebook and then has a series of single plugins that you can activate as you need them.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/simple-facebook-connect/

HyperArts

Another really useful resource that I stumbled upon is on HyperArts a blog written by Tim Ware

http://www.hyperarts.com/blog/how-to-add-facebook-like-button-social-plugins-to-wordpress-posts/#og-type

this is more for coders and people who want to get down and dirty with FBML and hacking up your wordpress theme.

Like Buttons

As you can see if you are reading this post on my blog that I have configured the like button to show up at the top and bottom of every post. This is a great way for people to share your content directly to Facebooks newsfeed.

 

 

 

 

Filed Under: Facebook For Business, Facebook Marketing, facebook tips, Facebook Widgets, social media marketing, Viral Marketing

How To Block Facebook Applications From Posting On Your Wall

January 4, 2010 by 67 Comments

Since the recent changes in Facebooks privacy settings they have inadvertently removed your ability to control how applications can post to your wall. If you have a lot of friends on Facebook then I suspect that your wall is probably starting to look like mine and getting overloaded with spam. There is a solution but it means manually blocking each offending application. This quick tutorial will show you how to get your wall back to the way it used to be so you can actually see things that are more relevant

Is Your Facebook Wall Becoming Cluttered With Spammy Apps?

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You Have To Block Each Facebook Application Individually

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Click on the link that takes you to the Facebook Application that made the post on your wall

You Need To Go To The Applications Profile Page

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When you are asked to allow access to the Application DO NOT click on the “Allow” button. Instead click on the hyperlink for the actual application.
This will now take you to the applications main profile page

You Can Now Block The Facebook Application

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Click Again On The “Block” Button To Confirm Your Choice

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When you block the Application it will no longer be able to post on your Facebook wall. You now have to repeat this process for all the offending applications. Once this is done you will soon see that the amount of spam on your wall is greatly reduced.

Another Way To Block Applications

Another way to prevent applications from sending you invites it to block the application and to also ignore all further invitations from the person who sent them to you. To do this you need to go to your Requests found on the top right of your Facebook homepage

Go To Your Facebook Home Page

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Select the “home” link when you are logged into Facebook. This should take you to your main Facebook home page. Your requests are located on the right hand side of the page

Select “Other Requests”

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When you select “Other Requests” you can scroll down to the very bottom to see any unwanted application invites that you have received

You Can Now Block This Application

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Select “Okay”

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Just Click on the “Okay” button and the application will no longer be able to send you invitations or post to your wall

You Can Also Ignore All Invites From This Friend

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If a particular person is sending you a lot of invitations for Facebook applications and you don’t want to remove them as a friend you can just choose to “Ignore All Invites From This Friend” the person will not know you have blocked them.

Privacy Settings

I hope that in the future Facebook will give a simpler one click option for managing how Applications can interact with your profile instead of having to do it in this more tedious way. I spent a while trying to discover if there was an easier way. I hope this blog post will helped to improve your overall Facebook experience so you can focus on what your real friends are actually doing.

Filed Under: facebook, Facebook For Business, facebook tips Tagged With: , , , ,

Grow Your Facebook Fan Page Using A Facebook Fan Badge

November 19, 2009 by 10 Comments

This article will show you how to “Leverage The Love” of your Facebook Fans to grow your Facebook Fanpage. If you want to get a ton of free traffic and new Fans to your fan page Facebooks new widget might help.

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If you have your own Facebook Fan Page, one way to get your Fans to promote your page is to ask them to place a Fan Badge on their website or blog

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If you are an admin, the best way to show your fans how to put a Fan Badge on their site is to do this yourself first and then educate your Fans by showing them exactly how to do it too. You could make a quick camtasia video and post it on your fan page or direct them to this article. Better still copy the link from the widget you create and post it on your Fan Page. http://www.facebook.com/facebook-widgets/fanbadges.php?page_id=158064879912

Click on the “Promote with a Fan Box” link just below the Fan Page logo image on the left side of the page

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Now select “Widgets Home”

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You will now be taken to the main Facebook Widgets Page : http://www.facebook.com/facebook-widgets/index.php

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Select the “Fan Badge” link

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From the first drop down menu select the Fan Page you want to create the badge for

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You should get a preview displayed on the right of the page

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Now select the text inside the box and Copy it to your clipboard by clicking CTRL C

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Now go to your blog or website. In this example I am using my wordpress.org blog

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Login to the backend of your WordPress blog, http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin
Click on “Appearance” and then select “Widgets”

Drag a “Text” widget to one of your sidebars

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Click on ther new widget and paste in your code from Facebook

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Dont forget to click “Save”

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Now visit your website to check everything is working

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In this example I have place the Fan Badge in the left hand sidebar

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Your Fan Badge will now have a live link back to your Favorite Fan Page

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Share The Love

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Get into the habit of sharing your favorite Fan Pages on your Website, It’s probably one of the quickest ways to build a relationship with the admin of any Fan Page and if you share other peoples pages they may reciprocate and share yours.
Filed Under: Facebook Advertising, Facebook For Business, Facebook Marketing, facebook tips, Facebook Widgets, social media marketing, Uncategorized

Facebook Pages – How To Add A Facebook Fan Box To Your WordPress Blog

July 10, 2009 by 627 Comments

Get More Fans For Your Facebook Fan Page

Yesterday Facebook released a new application that allows you to place a Facebook Connect widget on your website that links directly to your Facebook fan page

This article will show you how easy it is to add a Facebook Fan box to your blog or website. What this means is that you will be able to attract more Fans to your Facebook page and your prospective fans will instantly see your stream and your other Fans and get some idea about what type of content you will be sharing

Set Up A Facebook Page

You need to have a Facebook Fan page in order to use this application, just scroll to the bottom of your facebook profile and click on “advertising” and then select the “pages” tab and then select “Create A Page”, for more information on how to create a Facebook Page check out this blog post on AllFacebook  – “how to create a Facebook fan page to attract millions of fans” check out Mari Smiths blog post “how  to create and promote a Facebook fan page”

Once you have your fan page set up you can create your fan widget by going to your admin panel, from your page you just click the link Edit Page link that is below your Fan Page Image/Logo

Select “Add Fan Box” Box from your Admin Panel

add a fan box

Now select your Fan page from the drop down menu and facebook will show you a preview of what your Fan Box will look like. If you want to make it smaller just uncheck the boxes that say “include stream” and “include fans” (this might be necessary if you want to improve the load time of your blog or website or if you are limited for space)

Copy  The Java Script Code

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Now select all the code by highlighting it (CTRL A, CTRL C (pc) CMD A, CMD C (mac)) and copy it to your clip board. If you are a techie and want to find out a bit more about customizing your widget click on “advanced options” and you will be taken to Facebook developers where they have detailed instructions on how to add a fan box

Go to your blog and log into the admin section, for this example I am using wordpress but the technique should be similar on any other platform

Add A New Text Widget

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From your dashboard , select appearance and then select  “Widgets”

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Now create a new text widget.

Depending on which version of WordPress you are using this will be slightly different, if wordpress 2.8  just drag and drop a text widget to one of your sidebars and place it where you want it to appear. If your blog theme is enabled with footer widgets you might want to place it there as Javascript and Facebook connect are notorious for slowing down your blog load times

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Paste The Code Into Your Widget

Now paste the code from Facebook into your text widget and remeber to click Save

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Now Go And See What It Looks Like!

That’s it all done, wasn’t too painful was it?  All you have to do now is go to your site and see what it looks like

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Advantage Of having A Facebook Fan Box

The main advantage of having a Facebook fan box is that your visitors can become Fans immediatly as long as they are already signed into Facebook. Before this it was a two step process where you had to take people to your Fan page and then convice them to click on the “become a fan” button

What I like even more is that I can see immediatly what content is being shared on a Fan page and who the other members are. All the links are clickable so some marketers might say this is  leak away from having visitors staying on your blog. I personally disagree. I think people are more likely to come back to your blog, engage with your content  and be able to quickly scan your fanpage stream without having to visit Facebook.  If they do decide to leave you have some control over the links that they will visit.

Getting Your Community Connected

The advantages of having your community connected with each other are immense. The more networked your Fans are the more effect any fan interactions will have on facebooks newsfeed. More people will see if their friends are commenting or liking the content that you publish in your stream. Your aim is to create and own an  integrated network of Fans where information and news spreads rapidly and your fan page is the centre and hub  that this revolves around.

If your blog is hosted on WordPress.com

A number of readers have discovered that it’s not possible to add this widget to free wordpress.com blogs. This is mainly due to  a restriction on allowing Javascript code to be placed on their servers. If this is the case the only solution I can suggest  if you want to have your own Facebook Fan Box is to move your blog over to WordPress.org and purchase your own domain name and hosting. You can buy a domain name for $10 from Godaddy and get cheap hosting from Hostgator

Share This Post

If you have enjoyed this post, please do me a favor and share it on Facebook with all your friends, they will definitely thank you for it. Please leave any comments or questions below, I would love to hear your feedback.

My Fan Page : http://www.facebook.com/idchapman

My Facebook Profile : http://www.facebook.com/iandavidchapman

Follow Me On Twitter : http://www.twitter.com/iandavidchapman

My Blog : http://www.iandavidchapman.com

Filed Under: blogging, facebook, Facebook For Business, facebook tips, social media marketing, Uncategorized, Viral Marketing, web 3.0, wordpress Tagged With: , , , ,