Facebook Fan pages are a great way to connect with tons of people who can help you drive traffic to your website. As you may or may not have already discovered, there are people who will visit your site through the web itself, and others who will read your content via your site’s Facebook Fan page. In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to link your blog posts to your Facebook Fan page, so that every time you publish a post on your blog, your Facebook Fan page is updated with this post as well.
But first you’ve got to have a fan page. You can learn how to create a Facebook Fan page in this article.
Facebook Fan Pages and RSS Feeds
The basic concept is that a Facebook Fan page will subscribe to the RSS feed for a blog and then post the contents of this feed on the fan page as the feed (and blog) is updated. If the term RSS feed doesn’t mean anything to you, don’t worry. Just understand that an RSS feed is basically a list of the content on your website that is presented without all the graphics of your website, and is used by people to quickly see the content on a website. Every time you post an article on your blog, your RSS feed is “auto-magically” updated. So people who want to keep up with the content of your site — but don’t necessarily want to visit the site every day, can subscribe to your RSS feed
And this is exactly what your Facebook Fan page is going to do….it’s going to subscribe to your blog’s RSS feed and thus keep all of the fans of your Facebook page updated with your new posts. It will be as if all of the fans on your Facebook page are subscribing to your RSS feed.
Practically every blog platform out there (Wordpress, Blogger, Movable Type) has a built in RSS feed for every site that is created. For example, the RSS feed location for a wordpress site is usually www.yoursite.com/feed. To see what the RSS feed looks like, go ahead and find out the address of your feed and type it into your browser. The feed for my site, www.classicalweekly.com which is Wordpress-based is, you guessed it, www.classicalweekly.com/feed. So you will see that all of the content is there, but it’s presented in a pretty clean and clear format.
How to Connect your Blog to your Fan Page (or How to Connect your Facebook Fan Page to your Blog)
1. Find ths RSS feed for your site. As stated above, it’s usually your site plus “/feed” so: www.classicalweekly.com/feed. Try it for your site and see if something comes up. If not do a Google search for the RSS address for your platform (e.g. “What is the RSS feed address for a blogger blog?” and you should see some answers).
2. Go to your Facebook Fan page and hit the “plus” tab, and select Notes.
3. At the bottom left in the left column, select “Edit Import Settings”
4. Enter the URL of your feed (that you found in Step 1).
Facebook is a bit quirky with this and may or may not import all of your old feeds. It also may take some time before your Fan page is updated after you post on your blog (I’ve seen it where my Facebook Fan page is updated in 5 minutes, and I’ve seen it where it takes a few hours).
Either way, you are now connected. And remember, keep on posting, because “content is king”.