Make Your Website Your Facebook Page

On April 21, 2010 Facebook expanded its presence across the web through the Open Graph protocol. This Open Graph enables any website to be a part of Facebook’s social environment without having a Facebook company page.  So if you are a business owner and don’t currently have a Facebook company page, but want to have a presence on Facebook, you can now do just that. 

You may have recently seen Recommend or Like buttons on some website’s pages.  With these buttons, users can easily share the website’s page with their friends on Facebook.  Below are examples of these buttons and how they may look:

You may see some sites that have these buttons with a bit more personalization. For example, it may show how many of your friends Like or Recommend the same content (when you are logged into Facebook) while viewing the page. If you are not logged into Facebook, you will simply see the number of people who Like or Recommended the page. You can choose whether you want to have Like or Recommend text within the button, but these are often used for different types of content.  For example, you wouldn’t really want to “like” an article about a natural disaster, but you may choose to recommend that article instead.

When someone Likes or Recommends a page, that page is pushed to the user’s Facebook news feed allowing their friends to see, and a link will be included back to the original page. In addition, your content can be included within the search results on Facebook and in user profiles. As the administrator or “admin” of the page, you will have access to Facebook’s new Insights for Your Domain.  These new insights will provide you with detailed information about how users share and interact with your content.

So how do you get your website’ to be part of Facebook? First you need to make sure that you tell Facebook specific information about your page. This is done by adding tags to your pages, following Facebook’s Open Graph protocol.  The buttons will need to be installed on the page as well.

Facebook has and will continue to make changes that will further enhance the capabilities for marketers.  This is just one step toward integrating any type of web content into Facebook and making Facebook more prominent throughout the entire web.