web 3.0

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

July 10, 2009 by ian david chapman 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

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

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

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

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

Paste The Code Into Your Widget

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

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

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: facebook, facebook fan box, facebook fan page, facebook page, how to add a fan box

How To Add Facebook Connect To Your Blog

March 19, 2009 by ian david chapman 106 Comments

The Easy Way To Integrate The Viral Power Of Facebook Into Your Blog

This blog post will show you how you can integrate the viral power of Facebook Connect with your wordpress blog without touching a single bit of code. Its done by using a neat plugin created by Spanish blogger Javier Reyes

Most people get put off by mentions of API keys and messing with the code on their webpages. Luckily I stumbled upon this cool plugin that does all the work for you. If you follow each step carefully you will be up and running in no time

Even if you don’t have a wordpress blog, make sure you scroll to the bottom of this post where I will be explaining exactly how I will be using Facebook connect to initiate social activity and get immense viral exposure.

Click here to download the Facebook Connect WordPress plugin

http://www.sociable.es/facebook-connect/

Take a few minutes to watch the tutorial video that explains the features of this plugin

The next video gives an explanation of how to install this plugin and set up your API code

After you have downloaded the plugin to your computer you need to go to your blog and upload the file into your wp-content/plugins/ folder, you can do this by FTP or by going into the backend of your website if you have CPanel hosting.

Now login to the admin panel of your wordpress blog, I am using Wordpess 2.7 in this example, your screen might look slightly different if you are using earlier versions. Go to your plugins and activate the Facebook connector plugin

Now in your settings menu open Facebook connector you should have this screen visible

Get Your Facebook API Code

This plugin is an easy way for you to create your own Facebook application unique to your blog. In order for it to function you will need a Facebook developers account and obtain your Facebbook API key and Facebook API secret. These are just codes so Facebook can give you access to the user data that will be transferred to your blog. In a new browser window login to your Facebook account and scroll down to the very bottom of your profile page.

Now enter the name of your new application, agree to the terms of service and click save.

Now you have been given your API Key and API Secret, you need to copy and paste these numbers into your wordpress plugin settings

Now open the Connect tab and enter the URL of your blog.

Scroll to the bottom of the page and click save

In another browser window, copy and paste your API key and API secret into your Facebook Connector Options; check the boxes to allow full functionality on your blog

Scroll down to create the message template; if you want to customize the messages you can edit the text in the boxes

After you have clicked create template the plugin should have two yellow boxes at the top indicating that everything is now functioning

You can now place a widget on your sidebar so your blog visitors can login and interact with your blog. Any comments they make will be posted directly to their Facebook profile

drag and drop the widget to your required position and adjust its settings

Your Facebook connect plugin should now be fully functioning. Go to your blogs homepage and check everything is working

The sidebar widget should look something like this

Click on the Connect with Facebook button and start interacting

Now you can invite all your friends to come and visit your blog and more importantly all your visitors can invite all their friends too

Social Interaction Goes Viral

What does all this social activity mean, and how is it going to help you? As an example I am going to see how much activity I can generate from this blog post using a variety of means. Immediately after I publish this post I am going to go to go and invite 16 of my friends to come and visit my blog post using the friend connect widget.

I am going to ask those 16 people to invite 16 of their friends to come and see this post too. I hope to start a viral chain reaction that will impact into Facebooks newsfeed.

Syndication

My blog is syndicated to my Twitter account and to my Facebook profile so as soon as it gets published a tweet will get sent and the full RSS feed will be imported as a Facebook note. The next day I am going to go to my Facebook note and tag a further 30 people in this note. I am going to ask people to give it a thumbs up or to press the share button

It’s a fine balance when doing this kind of thing, Only people who have wordpress blogs will be really interested in this post, but I hope other people will want to see the real viral power of Friend Connect in action

Using Groups

Once I have some impact in Facebooks newsfeed I am going to send a message to my Facebooks groups, inviting them to learn about Facebook Connect. I hope that some of my other friends who have big groups will do same.

Become An Early Adopter

There is a huge advantage to becoming an early adopter of the community building tools like Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect. You have the potential to take your friends with you wherever you go on the web. So if you see a great blog post you can leave a comment and it will go straight into your newsfeed for your friends to see. Bloggers can expect more traffic to be circulating back and forth from social sites like Facebook opening up a huge potential of viral social interaction.

How Viral Is Facebook?

With your help we can find out; only by testing new strategies can we discover what their limitations are and how much exposure they bring. I will be tracking the results and monitoring the newsfeed and comments on this blog. Of course I am taking a big risk because I might end up annoying some people, I am willing to do this because I see there is a huge potential available and I love sharing with my online community

What You Can Do Now

1. If you are on my blog http://www.iandavidchapman.com you can sign in to Facebook Connect and leave a comment
2. If you are on Facebook reading this you can leave a comment either in the newsfeed or at the bottom of this note. If you like the post click the share button at the top. or give it a thumbs up. You can visit my blog to see the plugin in action by
clicking on this link http://www.iandavidchapman.com

3. If you have a wordpress blog you can follow this tutorial and get started right away. For those who are technically challenged and don’t know how to add new plugins get your webmaster to do all this for you. Implementation is the key. Come back and leave a comment in this thread so other people reading this post can visit your blog and share it with their friends.

4. If you have any friends who have a wordpress blog or might be interested in Facebook Connect you can invite them to come and see this post, by clicking on the Invite Your Friends button on the Connect Widget

5. If you are Google Friend Connect user why not join my site at the same time. Feel free to leave a comment in the social bar at the bottom of the page.

Thanks for taking the time to read this article, I hope you got some benefit from it and choose to help me in my experiment to prove that Facebook Connect is worth taking seriously. If you experience any problems with this plugin please contact the developers and read all the comment threads carefully, making sure you have completed all the requires steps.

Ian David Chapman

Filed Under: facebook, Popular Posts, social media marketing, Viral Marketing, web 3.0 Tagged With: blog, blogging, facebook, facebook connect, plugin, Viral Marketing, viral visibility, wordpress, wordpress plugin

Its Time For Collective Action – Web 3.0 Is Transforming Our Planet

October 28, 2008 by ian david chapman 3 Comments

If you are reading this post on Facebook and would like to watch the video please visit my blog

http://www.iandavidchapman.com/

Clay Shirky – Here Comes Everybody

[youtube]http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=A_0FgRKsqqU[/youtube]

Group Network Theory

If you want to begin to understand the direction that the internet is moving and if you want to harness the power of groups in your own business then spending 42 minutes watching Clay Shirky is time well spent

Clay Shirky explains group network theory in a simple and easy to understand way and I have begun applying his models to various situations and circumstances which I will explore in later blog posts. His basic premise is that groups go through 4 stages of development

1. Sharing

2. Conversation

3. Collaboration

4. Collective action

Tools To Change The World

Social Media has given us the tools to move rapidly through each of these stages and its now up to us as global internet citizens to decide what type of future we would like to create. The groups and networks you create today will be shaping the course of future history. We have never had such an opportunity or such freedom for collective creative expression as we do today.

We Have A Dream

So I would like to invite you to share your own vision for our collective future. How would you like to start this conversation , to be open to the possibility that no one person can dream it all on their own, that it has to be a collaborative effort. Can we look for ways to bring our collective force to bear fruit and manifest into this world, for each individual to be empowered to take actions that are coordinated towards our joint vision.

Out On The Edge

This is what I am passionate about and this is the main reason why I got involved in Social Media in the first place. Its an exciting time to be alive to witness this moment in history and I feel we are much further out on the edge than any of us really imagine. Those of you who I have spoken to personally will understand where I am coming from when I say this.

Circle Of Trust

Another friend Simon U Ford has been asking us to start recognizing the groups that we belong to and to begin to deepen those relationships. To think about building our circles of trust with those who we most resonate with. Without the need for any rulebook, allowing these natural structures to coalesce and begin forming on their own. Freely giving our energy and attention to these people and these groups.

Sharing

Sharing with a friend is free. Sharing with a friend adds value, Sharing with a friend shows that you care.

follow me on Twitter

http://www.twitter.com/iandavidchapman

Filed Under: Changing The World, Uncategorized, web 3.0 Tagged With: Changing The World, clay shirky, web 3.0, web3.0