Conventional wisdom holds that social media, including Facebook, is crucial to the promotion of any serious website. But is Facebook promotion worth it?
Almost certainly. With access to more than 500 million users, a reported value of $50 billion to $90 billion, and an ongoing buzzworthiness that never seems to falter, Facebook offers businesses and public forums an invaluable resource for connecting with customers and fans.
The Facebook development team has also made it easy for webmasters to publicize their sites. Back in the MySpace days, unless you were a musician, you were pretty much forced to create a separate MySpace account to promote a business. Not so with Facebook, which gives all users the ability to create a unique page dedicated to their business or promotion. (Note: If you’ve just created your Facebook account, you’ll have to wait a certain amount of time before you can create a page.)
To create a page, go here:
But despite the ease of creating a page for your business or promotion, there’s still the matter of manpower. How can you find the time to maintain your website while still updating your Facebook page and keeping things fresh?
You’ve got options. Here are some of my favorites:
TweetDeck
Recently acquired by Twitter, TweetDeck.com is a desktop-based application that lets you update multiple social-media pages from the same control panel, all at once. We’ll talk more about Twitter in a future article, but TweetDeck also integrates easily with Facebook. That means you can update your Facebook page (or pages) from one place.
Ping.fm
Similar to TweetDeck, Ping.fm is a free online service that lets you update multiple social media feeds from the same online panel. The major difference between Ping and TweetDeck is that Ping is a web-based interface, meaning that you’ll have to keep a browser open to Ping.
All Article Announce
But let’s say you’re running a blog, news magazine or other content-based website that updates regularly, and you don’t want to update your Facebook page every time you run a new article. There are several ways to automate that procedure. My favorite is the All Article Announce Joomla plugin:
You can integrate All Article Announce with any number of Facebook and Twitter accounts, and once you get it configured, it’ll automatically update all your Facebook and Twitter pages with your new content the moment you publish. It even shortens your links for Twitter.
Facebook social plugins
While surfing the web, you may have seen Facebook “like” buttons or small widgets that showcase a site’s Facebook presence. These plugins are extremely easy to add, and the appropriate code for these plugins can be found here:
Each has their own advantages. Let’s take a look at one site that uses both:
This Joomla 1.5-powered site makes use of a Facebook “Like” box, hardlinks to the site’s analogous Facebook and Twitter pages, and the All Article Announce plugin to keep both of its feeds updated.
ADVANTAGES OF USING FACEBOOK
- Easy to use.
- Access to large and active user base.
- Multiple solutions for updating and interacting with Facebook pages.
DISADVANTAGES
- Still requires a lot of heavy lifting – building a huge following on Facebook still takes time and energy.
- Facebook’s terms of use and interface are sometimes capricious – the Facebook staff often makes radical changes with little or no warning, and if they find a reason to disable your page, it will be difficult to get it back up again.
- Spam – spammers exist in hulking numbers on Facebook, and it takes energy to police them.
- Privacy concerns – when one of your surfers clicks the Facebook “like” button, it delivers information about their surfing habits to Facebook central command.
