1. Go to your Facebook page and click on “Edit Page”.
2. Next click on “Apps” on the left hand side. If you haven’t figured this out by now, “Apps” should be your new best friend when it comes to enhancing and customizing your Facebook page.
3. Locate the Notes app on the right and click on “Go to App” (not Edit Settings!)

4. You should now see the Notes page, which will be blank if you haven’t written any Notes. That’s fine, as when we are done that Notes page will have all our blog posts. Look to the left and locate the “Edit Import Settings” link, it will be at the bottom of the other items.
5. Now you should be at “Import Blog” all that is needed here is to type in the feed URL of your blog and save your work.

In the post I walked you step-by-step in creating a FBML page and placing the opt-in code on the page. It worked great, until Facebook did a major upgrade and deprecated FBML. You can no longer use FBML as of March 11, 2011. If you already have FBML pages they will work for “a while”. But that meant my post was out of date. So here’s the new version of the post.

So what’s the new way to do this? Let’s understand what Facebook did first. Facebook did away with FBML which you used to code directly on Facebook pages, but instead greatly expanded the ability to pull in functionality via the apps concept. Essentially you can run code that is hosted on your own servers and use Facebook to present your own tailored pages via iframes. It’s a nice concept and much more flexible than what was available before. This is a huge boon for businesses that have web development resources. They build cool stuff, deploy it on their servers and then pull it into their Facebook pages by registering it as an app.

But where does that leave the small business who struggles just to keep their basic business website updated? Kind of in the cold.

But for some common needs, such as adding a opt-in box to your Facebook page, your ESP (email service provider) has stepped into the gap. The good news is that those apps make it easier to have an opt-in box in Facebook than before.

To start out you need to have created a Facebook page and have signed up with an autoresponder system such as aweber or a email service icontact. These email marketing systems manage your list that you send your ezines and offers to by email. Both have created an app that you need to install into your Facebook account. With AWeber (and with the other ESPs) it will go smoother if you already have a list and webform set up.

I installed a AWeber form onto the Webenso Facebook page (which is not exactly ready for prime time, but is serving as a useful testbed for me). AWeber does a good job of walking you through the eight steps that are needed so I won’t replicate them here. It even gives you a link to locate the app in Step 1 (which is good because I couldn’t find it through the apps search function in Facebook). One odd thing that was not mentioned was that I had to switch back to my personal profile from my page profile to complete the installation which was strange but worked.

If everything goes well, you should see the AWeber app listed in your apps list as shown below (I also see it in my left nav on my home page).

Don’t forget to do the last step “Edit Settings” (last part of Step 8), otherwise you will not see the “tab” on your page’s left nav bar which may be disconcerting. A nice bonus is that you can name the tab anything you want.

I used existing web form that I had already created for a website, however a Facebook page has a lot more space on it, so you should consider creating a new form for your Facebook page. However you will need to create it in AWeber first before installing into Facebook as it needs to appear in the webform dropdown list in Step 7.

The iContact installation instructions are similar.

For other ESPs, just try typing in your ESP name and “Facebook” into Google or Bing. BTW, I’m finding that Chrome and Facebook don’t play nicely together (the cynic in me wonders why…). I used Firefox instead to do the installation instead.

Let me know your experiences with ESPs other than AWeber.

First a clarification, a Facebook Fan page is actually a number of pages (or tabs), the most familiar being your Wall, so what pagemodo will build for you is a new “tab” for your Facebook page. For example you might want to create a landing page to welcome new fans to your Facebook page, this is a good candidate for a pagemodo created page. You will still need to create your actual page in Facebook before pagemodo installs the “page” you built, however pagemodo detects this and directs you over to Facebook to do this prior to installation.

pagemodo Webenso Welcome Page

If you want a eye catching graphics rich page to feature your business wares or other photos, pagemodo could be a good fit for you. Most of the templates require several pictures which is good to know up front.

pagemodo has several graphics rich templates to choose from

The user interface is fairly intuitive although given to some glitches. I lost my work when I clicked away to check out their questions and answers on how the Facebook page creation works (as mentioned above, you have to create the page separately in Facebook). The graphic “sizer” helps you scale your pictures so that they fit into the template.

Here’s my free pagemodo Facebook welcome page. I don’t know if I will keep it long term, but it’s there now.

Pagemodo released an update, 2.0, on June, 27, 2011. There are more layouts to choose and some new features, such as coupons, facebook “Like” gates and more.

• New look and feel that is aligned with personal pages – photos on top, and tabs converted to links on the left
• Split personality – You can now interact with Facebook either as a human OR YOUR PAGE. This is pretty interesting. So when you comment on sometime else’s wall you can do it as your page, which means they get to your fan page not your personal profile when they click on the link.
• Fan page “opt in” – You can set up your pages (what used to be tabs) to “reveal” themselves when a visitor likes your Fan page.
• No more FBML, instead for custom pages you have to use iFrames. What happens with existing FBML, I don’t know, I guess we will find out on March 11, 2011 when all fan pages are upgraded.
• Your profile picture can be bigger: 180 pixels by 540 pixels. Many Facebooks Fashionistas are using the larger space to have a more of a “branded” graphic on their fan page

2010 is the year that Facebook came out from its walled garden, it’s no longer just a destination site that you hang out in, now Facebook is out and about in the wild. It started with the April announcement of a partnership with Yelp, Pandora, and other sites to share your data with those sites via a feature called “instant personalization“. Later I started noticing that you could use your Facebook login details to log into meetup.com, among other sites.

But what really got Facebook out into the Internet wild was the “Like/Recommend” buttons that was a hit with many websites. Corporations rightly realized this was a way to get site visitors to spread the word about their messaging and web content among their friends and the buttons were adopted like wildfire. The premise is core to the basic Facebook philosophy, in that people trust referrals from friends above all else. Contrast this with the Google philosophy, which is about discovering what is popular and authoritative in the websphere and getting that in front of the searcher.

If you are interested in adding the “Like” or “Recommend” Facebook buttons (there is no difference between the two), first read through this problogger post that might help you decide whether they are right for your website. The post pushed adding the Facebook like button to this blog further down my todo list as testing showed that tech topics tend to do better on Twitter than on Facebook.

The latest from Facebook is Facebook messaging. Facebook users have always been able to message one and other privately, the new feature takes that one step further with the addition of an externally available email address that matches your username, and also by interweaving your chats and texts into one central place . This is a shot across gmail’s bow (even with the recently introduced “priority” feature) and it could be a category killer impacting yahoo and hotmail as well. I wonder what it will mean to the email marketers, as facebook messaging prioritizes messages from your friends above any emails you get by being on a list.

Have you registered for your @facebook.com email account yet? It’s being rolled out in phases, but you can register now at: www.facebook.com/about/messages/. (I wonder, will having a gmail account delay or hasten the time I get my invitation?) Otherwise you can wait until a “Claim Your Facebook email” link shows up in your Messages view.

Usernames are different from the actual page names in that they are like a vanity URL for your page. The page name is what appears on the page itself.

There is a catch, however, in that at least 25 people must “like” your new fan page before you are allowed to choose a username for it. For my partner Bonnie, social networker that she is, that wasn’t a problem, she achieved that within a day. Note to self, there is a reason you partner ….

Username for Facebook Fan Page

Contrary to what I thought, you don’t create a username for your page by editing the page. No you go to a separate URL to actually create it: facebook.com/username. If you have chosen a username for your personal profile it will show you that, and if you have any fan pages, there will be a second box with a dropdown list. Choose your page from that list and then type in your username. As it warns you, once chosen, you can’t change it, so choose wisely.