Facebook has a heck of a lot of users who have a lot to say about
things. Facebook recently set up a commenting system (Comments Box)
based around their social sharing/chat infrastructure. It is in direct
competition with the like of Disqus (which you’ll see currently gracing
the comments area of this page) in that it’s a hosted commenting
service. Rather than storing comments on your website, in the database
of your CMS, the comments are stored in
Facebooks (or Disqus or other services) cloud. This has plusses and
minuses, the over-riding huge plus is the socially viral thing this
should facilitate.
“Comments Box is a social plugin that enables user commenting on your site. Features include moderation tools and distribution.” It is one of their “social plugins” which export Facebook’s capabilities out into the web in general. The ubiquitous “Like” buttons strewn all over the web is an example of their social plugins.
With the Comments Box visitors see a facebook-style box like this:
What’s shown is the moderators view, whereas “normal” users will see a slightly different view which obviously won’t include links for moderating comments or settings.
The idea is your visitor will see it, type in a comment because your content is so wonderful. Their comment will be seen on the page PLUS be posted to their facebook activity stream. That means their friends will see the comment, become intrigued, and head over to your site to see what the fuss is about. You get more traffic. Profit.
Or something like that.
To get this for your website head over to the facebook page linked below. There is a form on the page to enter the URL of your website. It does mean registering your website with facebook so that an AppID can be assigned. Facebook makes registering your site fairly easy, but it’s developery enough you might get confused. You can register multiple sites with Facebook and they each get their own AppID string. The registration process gives you some HTML code that’s the outline of a page containing Facebook support. It will be a little confusing to determine which parts of that sample page to paste into your page, so take it carefully.
An interesting thing about this is the moderators and settings views to the plugin. Unlike the Disqus service you can manage the Comments Box directly from your website rather than having to go to Facebooks website. Brilliant.
It’s fairly straightforward what everything means here.. select the options you prefer, and click Save. Easy peasy.
Implementing the moderators and settings support is straightforward, and documented on Facebook’s page. To clarify their instructions, your site must first be registered with Facebook as mentioned earlier. Next they discuss adding two META tags, which I found work perfectly if placed in the HEAD section of your HTML. YOUR_FACEBOOK_USER_ID is found on your Facebook Account page. YOUR_APPLICATION_ID is obviously the AppID provided by Facebook when you registered your site.
The main problem with hosting comments on your website is dealing with the spammers. Allowing for comments is part of the read-write-web genre and is part of what makes the Internet such a wonderful global forum. But the spammers seem dead set on ruining it for all of us. Enabling comments on a website seems to draw spammers like a magnet and one of the reasons to implement a service like Disqus is because it does a great job of keeping the spammers out. Well, Facebook’s practices also do a great job of keeping spammers out plus they’re highly focused on creating a great commons for people talking things over with their friends.
This appears to be a wonderful service. I just installed it about an hour ago and have yet to see the results. Will update this later with experience.
To see it in operation visit: http://rules4humans.com/
If you have any comments or suggestions on this or other topics, feel free to let me know below.
Theoretically facebook fan pages are useful when they’re fed with new content. Notices are sent to the walls of fans of anything posted on the fan page. If ones intent is positive social change, one way to implement it is sending a stream of messages about your message. With a facebook fan page it’s as simple as going to that page, and posting something on that wall, and which is course sent to the walls of the pages fans.
It’s as simple as that. Make postings on your page, the fans receive the postings, and some of them will actually read it and take an action.
A few months ago I became a fan of Self Acceptance (a.k.a. “Self-Acceptance
If you want things to be different, perhaps the answer is to become different yourself - Norman Vincent Peale”). I like their message but they started sending out 20 postings a day. It was so much I made this wall posting:
A question is whether manually posting on the fan page gives a personal touch. Some people might prefer a personal touch on fan pages. On the other hand building a social media outreach means not just a fan page or two, but to establish a presence in many social media outlets. It may be impractical to manually manage every social media presence that you build.
A hybrid approach should be possible. Set up some automatic postings, and make some manual postings. Further if your fan page has a discussion board it will help to routinely visit and partake in discussion on that fan page.
“Automatic postings” can be as simple as connecting up an RSS feed so that blog posts are automatically posted on the fan page.
What they say: “RSS Graffiti is a fun little Facebook application that is meant to take the fuss out of keeping your Facebook friends and fans updated with the latest news from your other sites.” and “RSS Graffiti periodically checks the RSS/Atom feeds that you specify and posts any new entries it finds to the Facebook Walls that you specify. You can get any feed written on any wall. In fact, multiple feeds to multiple walls. You choose the combination.”
It’s rather simple to install though Facebook makes it more difficult than perhaps it has to be.
On your fan page click on Edit Page. Towards the bottom is a choice labeled “More Applications” and “Browse more”, click on that link. There’s a whole bunch of applications in here and some of them might even be useful.
To find RSSGraffiti enter “RSS” in the search box. Several results come up but for some reason I chose to use RSSGraffiti. Anyway, click on its entry in the list. If you try one of the others and like it please let me know.
Clicking on the RSSGraffiti item brings you to RSSGraffiti’s fan page. There is a choice labeled “Add to my page”, click on that. A box pops up listing all your pages, simply click on one of them.
Here’s where it would be more helpful if they took you back to your page, but they don’t. Go back to your page, click on Edit Page, and now see that RSS Graffiti is in the list.
There is a whole lot of permission settings that are required to use RSSGraffiti to connect one or more RSS feeds to your page. First click on Application Settings, a box pops up asking for permission to publish to your page. I think it’s obvious that you want them to do this but it’s nice that they asked. Next click on the Edit link and on the next page there are a total of five permissions to grant. Read carefully and click away to approve the permissions. It does give them some kind of access to your account so read carefully and make sure you understand it.
Once you’ve agreed to the permissions you’re ready for the next step. Setting up a feed.
Click on Add Feed. The screen changes to ask for the Feed URL and the Feed Name. Just enter those and click Save.
Feed URL? This is the access code for the RSS feed you want fed to your page. Usually there is a bright orange icon that links to the RSS feed. If so, right click on the icon and in the popup menu select “Copy Link Address” (or equivalent phrase) and then you can use CTRL-V (or Command-V) to paste that URL into the Feed URL box.
Before any items get posted to your wall, you have to make a posting on your blog. It turns out that RSSGraffiti only posts new items to the wall. And even then it doesn’t seem to post all items. On a busy blog it’s not exactly friendly to post every single item to the wall because your fans might feel inundated and turn from fans to enemies.
This video is all about how to create a landing page with the Static HTML: iFrame tabs application. This is necessary after March 11, 2011 because Facebook is getting rid of the ability to create tabs with FBML. Now, with HTML, you’ll have an easier time jazzing up your landing page with things like opt-in forms, videos, pictures and just making it look great to get people to more quickly click the ‘like’ button of your page and become a fan. With the Static HTML iFrames Tab Application, you also have the ability to create a landing page for both non-fans and fans.
“Comments Box is a social plugin that enables user commenting on your site. Features include moderation tools and distribution.” It is one of their “social plugins” which export Facebook’s capabilities out into the web in general. The ubiquitous “Like” buttons strewn all over the web is an example of their social plugins.
With the Comments Box visitors see a facebook-style box like this:
What’s shown is the moderators view, whereas “normal” users will see a slightly different view which obviously won’t include links for moderating comments or settings.
The idea is your visitor will see it, type in a comment because your content is so wonderful. Their comment will be seen on the page PLUS be posted to their facebook activity stream. That means their friends will see the comment, become intrigued, and head over to your site to see what the fuss is about. You get more traffic. Profit.
Or something like that.
To get this for your website head over to the facebook page linked below. There is a form on the page to enter the URL of your website. It does mean registering your website with facebook so that an AppID can be assigned. Facebook makes registering your site fairly easy, but it’s developery enough you might get confused. You can register multiple sites with Facebook and they each get their own AppID string. The registration process gives you some HTML code that’s the outline of a page containing Facebook support. It will be a little confusing to determine which parts of that sample page to paste into your page, so take it carefully.
An interesting thing about this is the moderators and settings views to the plugin. Unlike the Disqus service you can manage the Comments Box directly from your website rather than having to go to Facebooks website. Brilliant.
It’s fairly straightforward what everything means here.. select the options you prefer, and click Save. Easy peasy.
Implementing the moderators and settings support is straightforward, and documented on Facebook’s page. To clarify their instructions, your site must first be registered with Facebook as mentioned earlier. Next they discuss adding two META tags, which I found work perfectly if placed in the HEAD section of your HTML. YOUR_FACEBOOK_USER_ID is found on your Facebook Account page. YOUR_APPLICATION_ID is obviously the AppID provided by Facebook when you registered your site.
The main problem with hosting comments on your website is dealing with the spammers. Allowing for comments is part of the read-write-web genre and is part of what makes the Internet such a wonderful global forum. But the spammers seem dead set on ruining it for all of us. Enabling comments on a website seems to draw spammers like a magnet and one of the reasons to implement a service like Disqus is because it does a great job of keeping the spammers out. Well, Facebook’s practices also do a great job of keeping spammers out plus they’re highly focused on creating a great commons for people talking things over with their friends.
This appears to be a wonderful service. I just installed it about an hour ago and have yet to see the results. Will update this later with experience.
To see it in operation visit: http://rules4humans.com/
If you have any comments or suggestions on this or other topics, feel free to let me know below.
Theoretically facebook fan pages are useful when they’re fed with new content. Notices are sent to the walls of fans of anything posted on the fan page. If ones intent is positive social change, one way to implement it is sending a stream of messages about your message. With a facebook fan page it’s as simple as going to that page, and posting something on that wall, and which is course sent to the walls of the pages fans.
It’s as simple as that. Make postings on your page, the fans receive the postings, and some of them will actually read it and take an action.
How often?
There’s a fine line to walk in frequency. On the one hand posting often enough keeps your fan page in the mind of your fans. On the other hand posting too often can turn them off, make you seem like a spammer, and they ignore you.A few months ago I became a fan of Self Acceptance (a.k.a. “Self-Acceptance
If you want things to be different, perhaps the answer is to become different yourself - Norman Vincent Peale”). I like their message but they started sending out 20 postings a day. It was so much I made this wall posting:
I decided to become a fan of self acceptance, and now self acceptance is spamming me with a million messages. Who knew getting to know self acceptance would open up a can of worms like this? Am thinking of telling self acceptance to take a hike but that wouldn’t be accepting of self acceptance. What a quandary facebook gives me.Fortunately they decreased their posting rate and I didn’t have to take any drastic action.
Manual post or autopost?
There are tools (facebook applications) which can automatically make postings to a page.A question is whether manually posting on the fan page gives a personal touch. Some people might prefer a personal touch on fan pages. On the other hand building a social media outreach means not just a fan page or two, but to establish a presence in many social media outlets. It may be impractical to manually manage every social media presence that you build.
A hybrid approach should be possible. Set up some automatic postings, and make some manual postings. Further if your fan page has a discussion board it will help to routinely visit and partake in discussion on that fan page.
“Automatic postings” can be as simple as connecting up an RSS feed so that blog posts are automatically posted on the fan page.
Using RSSGrafitti to feed facebook pages
As noted already it’s helpful to feed content into your facebook fan page. RSSGrafitti makes it simple to do so from an RSS feed. RSS feeds are generated from many sources, the most common of which are blogs and podcasts. RSSGraffiti makes it trivial to repost snippets from your blog into a facebook fan page.What they say: “RSS Graffiti is a fun little Facebook application that is meant to take the fuss out of keeping your Facebook friends and fans updated with the latest news from your other sites.” and “RSS Graffiti periodically checks the RSS/Atom feeds that you specify and posts any new entries it finds to the Facebook Walls that you specify. You can get any feed written on any wall. In fact, multiple feeds to multiple walls. You choose the combination.”
It’s rather simple to install though Facebook makes it more difficult than perhaps it has to be.
On your fan page click on Edit Page. Towards the bottom is a choice labeled “More Applications” and “Browse more”, click on that link. There’s a whole bunch of applications in here and some of them might even be useful.
To find RSSGraffiti enter “RSS” in the search box. Several results come up but for some reason I chose to use RSSGraffiti. Anyway, click on its entry in the list. If you try one of the others and like it please let me know.
Clicking on the RSSGraffiti item brings you to RSSGraffiti’s fan page. There is a choice labeled “Add to my page”, click on that. A box pops up listing all your pages, simply click on one of them.
Here’s where it would be more helpful if they took you back to your page, but they don’t. Go back to your page, click on Edit Page, and now see that RSS Graffiti is in the list.
There is a whole lot of permission settings that are required to use RSSGraffiti to connect one or more RSS feeds to your page. First click on Application Settings, a box pops up asking for permission to publish to your page. I think it’s obvious that you want them to do this but it’s nice that they asked. Next click on the Edit link and on the next page there are a total of five permissions to grant. Read carefully and click away to approve the permissions. It does give them some kind of access to your account so read carefully and make sure you understand it.
Once you’ve agreed to the permissions you’re ready for the next step. Setting up a feed.
Click on Add Feed. The screen changes to ask for the Feed URL and the Feed Name. Just enter those and click Save.
Feed URL? This is the access code for the RSS feed you want fed to your page. Usually there is a bright orange icon that links to the RSS feed. If so, right click on the icon and in the popup menu select “Copy Link Address” (or equivalent phrase) and then you can use CTRL-V (or Command-V) to paste that URL into the Feed URL box.
Before any items get posted to your wall, you have to make a posting on your blog. It turns out that RSSGraffiti only posts new items to the wall. And even then it doesn’t seem to post all items. On a busy blog it’s not exactly friendly to post every single item to the wall because your fans might feel inundated and turn from fans to enemies.
Links: http://www.rssgraffiti.com/
Some useful tips on the care and feeding of viral facebook fan pages
These videos present a fairly straightforward model for adding viralness to facebook fan pages. It’s very simple but there are companies selling tools to implement the strategy. You don’t need expensive tools for this strategy, instead some simple HTML knowledge is all which is required.How to Create a Facebook Landing Page (HTML / iFrame Edition)
This video is all about how to create a landing page with the Static HTML: iFrame tabs application. This is necessary after March 11, 2011 because Facebook is getting rid of the ability to create tabs with FBML. Now, with HTML, you’ll have an easier time jazzing up your landing page with things like opt-in forms, videos, pictures and just making it look great to get people to more quickly click the ‘like’ button of your page and become a fan. With the Static HTML iFrames Tab Application, you also have the ability to create a landing page for both non-fans and fans.
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