A Facebook Page lets you share your website with others, and allows news of your site and new posts to travel easily among Facebook Friends. It’s an easy way to allow those that might like your website to discover and share it.
How do you make a Facebook Page?
This post shows you how to start a FB Page, and begin populating it with content through automatic publishing from your WordPress blog. You can use some great third-party plugins to do this. The system I’ll outline here creates an automatic social sharing arm of your website, pointing new visitors and expanding your website’s reach without having to do any extra steps or having to write additional content.
Once you have your WordPress website set up, use the following steps to install a third-party plugin, create a Facebook Page, and connect the two. These steps will show you how to set up the connection so that you can either publish new posts automatically to your Facebook Page, or so that you can choose post-by-post whether to publish to your Faceboook Page by clicking a single button within the WordPress dashboard.
Step One:
Log in to Facebook under your personal account. You can create a personal account at facebook.com if you don’t have one already. And, it’s important to know that once you create a Facebook Page for a website or business, your personal Facebook account will not be visible or in any way publicly connected to the Facebook Page.
Create a new Page in Facebook by scrolling to the bottom of any Facebook screen and clicking the “Create a Page” link. The URL is: http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php. There a couple of steps to creating the Facebook Page, just choose one of the options appropriate to your business or website, and go through the steps of adding some information content to start. You can also upload a logo or photographic image for the Profile pic.
Step Two:
Download Otto’s Simple Facebook Connect plugin through your WordPress Dashboard. To do this, go to Add New, under Plugins, and search for Simple Facebook Connect, choosing to download the plugin and activate it through the WordPress Dashboard for your website. The plugin is by Otto (you can verify you have the right plugin by noting the plugin author before downloading), and includes many additional plugins that you can activate selectively to enable whatever functions you want or need. For this tutorial, let’s activate “SFC – Publish” under Plugins in the Dashboard.
On a side note, you will discover through following the rest of these steps, that I’m creating both a Facebook Application and a Facebook Page to perform this integration. If starting from scratch, you can use your Facebook Application as a Facebook Page, with all the same functions, but to me it has some disadvantages which have me deciding to set up a separate Facebook Page in addition to the Application that we need to connect Facebook to the WordPress website. First, a Facebook Page comes ready to list the number of friends on the sidebar. An Application Page in Facebook needs more configuration to be able to do this. Secondly, the Facebook Page, once it has 25 “Likes,” can have a traditional Facebook URL, or web address. This address can be more easily remembered if you tell it to anyone or list it on your website. The Application Pages in Facebook begin their URL addresses with app.facebook.com/something, while a standard Facebook Page is just facebook.com/something. While you can configure an Application Page to look just like a Facebook Page, I prefer to keep the easy existing layout of the Facebook Page, and just use the Application we need to create to forward the WordPress post excerpts to the Facebook Page, which comes configured the way I want without any alterations needed.
Step Three:
Use links from your WordPress Dashboard to connect to the right Facebook areas and create an application to facilitate connecting to your Facebook Page. Within the Settings sidebar panel, click Simple Facebook Connect to get to the Plugins Settings Page for the plugin. There’s you’ll see links to Facebook and a short series of instructions for creating a Facebook Application, and getting some codes you need to copy and paste into the plugin settings page. You’ll need to copy and paste three sets of letters and numbers into WordPress – the Facebook API Key, Facebook Application Secret, and the Facebook Application ID. You can get these three keys from Facebook after you create the Application. You’ll also need your Facebook Page ID (also called a Fan Page) if you’re creating a separate Facebook Page as illustrated in this tutorial. You can get this by going to your Facebook Page and copying it from the URL in your browser’s address bar. It’s a 15-digit number.
After you copy and paste these Main Settings into the plugin settings page, Save your changes and you’ll see some Publish Settings options appear on the settings page within WordPress. You can now officially connect your WordPress website to Facebook by clicking the three buttons there, and clicking “Allow” when the Facebook popup windows come up. You can also enable automatic publishing to your Facebook Page by clicking the box next to “Automatically Publish to Facebook Fan Page.”
Step Four:
Well, that’s pretty much it! If you already have Posts published on your website, you can go into any Post’s editing screen and see the Facebook Publishing buttons on the right-side sidebar, and publish excerpts with thumbnails of images to your Facebook Page. If you checked the “Automatically Publish” box in the plugin settings, any new Post published on your website will also publish to the Facebook Page.
Now, it would be smart to Share your Facebook Page with your Facebook friends if you have them, by going to your Page and clicking Share at the bottom left side of the page. By doing this, you’re recommending your page and asking your friends to “Like” the page. When you have 25 “Likes,” you can get a Facebook custom URL, or web address, for your Page. 
Mine will be http://facebook.com/500pixels when I choose it, but I have to wait until I have 25 “Likes.” If you want to help, go to the page, here, and click Like! Thanks in advance! My page is new, and I’m looking to get 25 likes to get my custom URL.
Oh, one more thing, FYI. This system allows for word of your website to spread more rapidly, by harnessing the power of the Facebook Sharing system and it’s Wall Posts. It works like this. Say someone “Likes” your Facebook Page. When you make a new Post in WordPress, and your setup from above posts an excerpt and image thumbnail on your Facebook Page, that Wall Post, with a link to your website, also appears on the Facebook Walls of all that person’s Facebook friends. It means that every time you post something to your website, there’s potential for new readers to find out about your website. The number of possible connections to new readers can expand, not linearly, but exponentially, as more people “Like” your Facebook Page and therefore your website. That’s a great way of harnessing the power of Facebook Connections, so take advantage of the networking power of Facebook and use this setup to automate it as much as possible. You’ll expand your website’s reach much faster.
Tagged with: facebook • interaction • wordpress advanced
Filed under: Advanced WordPress • WordPress and Facebook
Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!
Leave a Reply