Tag: Facebook business page

Categories
Facebook Tab manager WordPress

Re-purpose a WordPress Post or Page with Facebook Tab Manager

I designed Facebook Tab Manager to let you create and update content for your Facebook business page using WordPress, but it’s also possible to re-purpose an existing blog post or page and display it within Facebook.

You do this by adding the query parameter ?fb=tab to the end of the URL, for example:

http://www.carrcommunications.com/2011/05/re-purpose-a-wordpress-post-or-page-with-facebook-tab-manager/?fb=tab&resize=1

This causes the content to be displayed in the fbtab template, using the default styles (Facebook fonts etc.). You would then plug this URL into the Facebook Developers utility the same way you would with any other Facebook Tab Manager post.

I used the resize parameter to make the iFrame for the tab content resize for content taller than 800 pixels to avoid the display of a vertical scroll bar. Note that this doesn’t do anything to avoid problems with content that is wider than the 540 pixels Facebook provides for tab content. So if your existing page or post includes a 550-pixel wide image, it’s not going to fit neatly into the iFrame.

The optional query parameters you can use are:

  • resize=1 (invoke the resizing JavaScript)
  • new=1 (links should open in a new window)
  • head=1 (execute wp_head)
  • footer=1 (execute wp_footer)
  • minfilters=1 (added in version 2.7.2, turns off all but essential filters on the_content)

Note that you could also use that last parameter in conjunction with a Facebook Tab Manager post as an alternative to selectively turning off filters on the_content. Useful if you’re trying to get rid of the output of plugins like Sociable that add icons and links to the end of each post.

Example:

http://www.carrcommunications.com/fbtab/test-6/?minfilters=1

Categories
Web Development

How to Create a Facebook Page: The Simple Steps Are The Most Important

Creating a Facebook page, also known as a Facebook business page or Facebook fan page, is probably one of the best things you can do right now to boost your brand, small business, non-profit, or political campaign. Some marketing experts believe capturing your Facebook page name (along with your Twitter URL) is proving almost as important as capturing your Internet domain name. And best of all, it’s free to get started.

There are several other good tutorials available, but I decided to write my own focused on the basics. At some point, you may decide to get ambitious enough to hire a team of programmers to create custom Facebook applications and page tabs. But you want to focus on the basics before you get dazzled by the possibilities of “s-commerce”, or immersed in the complexities of programming in Facebook Markup Language (FBML).

The first three things you want to do are the simplest:

  1. Register your page
  2. Invite friends and customers to “Like” the page (register to get your updates)
  3. Secure a unique page name. This appears like a directory under facebook.com, giving you an address pegged to your brand that you can print on business cards and promote in all the same ways you advertise your Internet domain. For example, Carr Communications is at www.facebook.com/carrcomm

Step #2 is a prerequisite for Step #3 because Facebook will not let you establish a name or “username” for your page until you have a minimum number of people “Like” your page. At this writing, you need 25 Facebook fans. And you want to secure the name that is the best match for your brand before someone else gets it.

Continue reading “How to Create a Facebook Page: The Simple Steps Are The Most Important”
Categories
Marketing and Publicity Web Development

Announcing a Free Tool: Create a Lead Capture Form That Connects Facebook to Your Website

Update: Facebook’s move to enable page tabs based on HTML iframes rather than FBML makes the specific techniques discussed below obsolete. Today I recommend instead using my Facebook Tab Manager for WordPress if your site is on WordPress. If you are not on WordPress, you should find that the task of integrating custom content including contact forms is now easier, overall.

As a sequel to my post on why Facebook Ads Should Point to a Facebook Page (Not an External Web Page), I cooked up a little homegrown tool that generates the required code. The source code output is derived from the example in George Huger’s Submitting a Contact Form via AJAX From Your Facebook Page. Huger shows how to use JavaScript functions that are approved for use within Facebook to submit a data entry form from within Facebook, have it processed on your web server, and get back an acknowledgement you can display on your Facebook page – without ever making the user leave Facebook and go to your website.

Read more and try it