Good old Facebook, eh? We all spend millions of minutes on it apparently. So if you run a business, there’s a far better chance of truly engaging with customer through Facebook than a ‘normal’ website (although you will probably need to do some research to find if that’s really where your audience is).
Let’s assume you’ve done your research, and then you’ve set up your Facebook page. Let’s also assume you have a WordPress website that has been lovingly designed and built by me. Or perhaps not so lovingly designed and built by some other developer (your loss). Eitherways, you want to make full use of your new electronic channels by pushing out messages on them.
Now if you are anything like me, you are a bit lazy and/or forgetful when it comes to updating all these various places. I mean, all this social media is all well and good, but it is a pain having to log in to three or four sites just to make let people know about an update on your website, or your latest blog. We want some automation!
For example, I am supremely lazy, so this blog is posted here, appears on my Facebook page, also gets pushed out to @Screen_Candy Twitter, which in turn shows up on my Linkedin profile. It’s social media madness! And best of all, I only have to update here.
In this post, I am going to tell you a bit about how I connect WordPress blogs to Facebook fan pages so the site automatically updates your Facebook page status. It’s a pretty common request that I am posed with, and actually not too difficult.
You will need:
- A WordPress website or blog
- A Facebook fan page. Note: When I refer to Facebook pages in this post, I am referring to fan pages, not personal profile pages.
- The ‘Add link to Facebook’ plugin* installed on your WordPress website.
* Yes, yes, I know there are other plugins out there that will do the job, but I am going to use this one because it’s free and a couple of the others I tried didn’t work. If anyone else has any other suggestions/methods for carrying this out or recommendations for more reliable plugins, I’d love to hear them!
There’s a few steps to this process and while they are explained pretty well in the plugin documentation, the task can seem a little daunting to begin with. I want to try to calm some of your fears about this: It sounds a lot more tricky than it is because geeks who make this kind of thing love having 20 granular options instead of just 2 that work.
1. First build an ‘app’ on your Facebook account. ‘Whoa!! An app?!?’ I hear you cry ‘But that’s something that only techie developers do!’. But it’s really not that bad.
Before you start you’ll need to make sure you have a verified your Facebook account. This is usually done by getting a code sent to your mobile phone. Start by going to: developers.facebook.com, then ‘Apps’ on the top menu, and click the ‘Add new app’ button. You’ll soon know if you need to verify your account.
2. The app we will be building for this is incredibly simple, so we only need to enter the bare minimum of information about it.. Fill in a name for your app. Note: this shows up at the bottom of your Facebook entry on the bit where it says: ‘Via xxxxx’, so choose it wisely! Then add your blog/website URL and a valid contact email, and that’s about it.
You will receive an ‘App API Key’ and ‘App Secret’. Copy these to your clipboard. Job done!
3. At this point you can take a few minutes to gloat to all your friends about becoming a Facebook App Developer.
4. But before you get too cocky you will need to actually do something with your App. Go back to your WordPress website admin panel and go to the settings for your ‘Add link to Facebook’ (rather strangely, they put it under the ‘Tools’ menu). In there, paste your API Key and Secret.
5. Now authorise the plugin to work on your page by clicking on the ‘Authorise’ button. The page should refresh and you will get a confirmation if everything has gone to plan.
6. Finally, you need to choose the correct Facebook page for your blog to publish on to. You will find this in a drop-down list which is under the ‘Page/Group’ tab on your ‘Add to Facebook’ settings page. Note that this list should include all the Facebook pages and apps that are related to you, so just make sure you don’t choose one that has ‘Application’ next to it.
7. Finally, do some configuration in the ‘Add to Facebook’ settings… But this part is up to you really. You can have comments from Facebook appearing in your blog if you want, and vice versa. I haven’t tried any of that out though, so don’t expect any help here.
Et voila!
Just one big word of warning: I tend to find that this particular plugin will occasionally reset itself – especially if you do things to your Facebook page like changing the name or anything else in the settings. It’s easy to remedy though. All you need to do is reauthorise the plugin on your WordPress website installation. This is usually your best bet if it seems that your blog posts are no longer publishing to your FB page.
