More and more companies are told you should have a blog as part of your web site. But only if you are going to be keeping the blog up to date on a regular basis.
In addition to having a blog, a lot of marketing experts will share with you that you should consider having a FaceBook account, a twitter account, and so on as the push towards being part of social media networks continues to increase.
A WordPress enthusiast and teacher, Bob Dunn, shared in a video of his I watched last week — Bob Dunn’s WordCamp Seattle Presentation — that if you are going to have social networking buttons or links on your site, it would be good that you use them.
To me, that translates that if you are going to link to Facebook, you should have a Facebook account, and try to keep your FaceBook account up to date as well as your blog.
If you are like most of our customers — small to medium businesses, you don’t need another thing added to your to do list.
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could just update your WordPress blog, and have the entries automatically feed into your Facebook account? If you are like me, you love killing two or more birds with the same stone.
Hooking your WordPress blog section to your Facebook account is easy; let me walk you through the steps:
- Log into your WordPress administrator area as the administrator user.
- Click on Settings, Reading.
- Make sure the radio button for “For each article in a feed, show” is set to “Full text” and click “Save Changes.” The reason for this is that when FaceBook links to your blog, if you just show the summary, that’s all Facebook will bring in (not even linking to the rest of the story). In settings, reading, where it states “Syndication feeds show the most recent” the number present is the number of blog entries Facebook.com will import. You can temporarily increase it before the import, and then when FaceBook is done importing, change it back.
- Open up your blog home page in your browser so you can easily copy and paste the blog home page URL.
- In a separate browser tab or window, browse your Facebook.com page.
- If you do not see “Notes” on the left (for Facebook.com notes), then click on the “Edit Page” icon / button.
- To add notes, on the left click on Apps, then Notes, and add it, and then click on “Go to App.”
- While on the Notes page, on the left, click on “Edit import settings“
- Put in the web page address (URL) of your blog, and follow the prompts to submit it.
Facebook.com will now import your blog entries.
Please note that if you have FaceBook tied to Twitter, that you will have to do a one time clean up of your Twitter account for any duplicates that FaceBook posted to twitter.com (if you were posting them manually or through a WordPress plugin).
It is ok to experiment. If you don’t like how the import went, delete the FaceBook notes, tell FaceBook to stop importing (that’s in the “Edit import settings” area), and then start over.
Once the import is done to your satisfaction, any new blog entries will show up in your FaceBook notes area once you publish them.
Now by keeping your blog up to date, you are also being more active on your FaceBook account as well. Two birds, one stone.