For Businesses: Feeding Your Blog Into Facebook

December 23rd, 2009 · View Comments

One of the great things about Social Networking is the ability to transparently publish information across various social networks simultaneously. When I update my personal blog, without additional interaction by me, updates are sent to my Facebook, Twitter and FriendFeed accounts. This is done via the magic of APIs and the widgets that utilize the existing sites API information

API is short for “Application Programming Interface,” and essentially allows third party developers to create new ways, or mashups, of the existing technology with other technologies – hence the transparency of publishing my content from my blog to other sites. One could argue that this ability is at the heart of Social Networking since personally I’d be less inclined to re-post my content repeatedly on other sites, which means more work for me and also takes out the “Gee-whiz!” factor when introduced to new mashups or widgets that will do it for me.

The interesting thing about all of this, however, is that when it comes to Facebook, how I am regarded as an individual is completely different to how Archive Media Partners (AMP) is regarded as a business. On most other networks, business and individuals are treated nearly identical when it comes to creating a presence on that network but Facebook, however, has a different model. Facebook has always maintained that there needs to be a separation between the two, which is especially crucial with how Facebook disseminates personal information as well as the concern over privacy controls.

While that topic can be a blog post (or even a series!) in its own right, we want to look how to get a business’ information into Facebook with the same ease as an individual. The first example of this is having your blog automatically update to Facebook when new content is published.

With an individual account, there is a variety of ways to do this via applications native to Facebook as well as widgets that can be installed. For a business, it is a little bit trickier. Here is how to do it:

Login into Facebook and click on Pages at the top. This will take you to the a listing of all the pages created for the business. Click on the page you wish to modify.

Once you click on the page you wish to modify, you’ll be presented with a variety of settings. In this section, you can modify which applications are visible on the published page. Scroll down and under Applications, look for Notes. Make sure that the link to Notes has been activated.

Click on Edit underneath Notes. Once in Notes, the note settings are located to the right. Click on import a blog link.

On this page, Facebook will gives the song and dance about importing a blog, mainly that the blog you are importing is your own. Well enough, in the box below the warning, where it says Web URL, paste the RSS feed of your blog into the box and below it, check the box for authorization.

Facebook will then refresh the page, showing the latest blog entry and will ask you to confirm the import. Thus, click on Confirm Import button.

And you’re done!

You can go to your page and test that the blog entries are showing up, but this is probably one of the more elegant ways of getting your blog feed into your Facebook wall. You can also remove the feed if you decide not to use it or update/change the feed as needed.

For more ideas on how to use Facebook as a business, look at Mashable’s Killer Facebook Fan Pages: 5 Inspiring Case Studies that illustrates how other companies use Best Practices when using Facebook, including feeding a blog into a Facebook wall.