If you saw a catchy title like “Four Things You Do To Kill Her Sex Drive” shared with you on Facebook wouldn’t you click on it? I admit that I did. And then I got this:

Washington Post Social Reader Facebook App

Note the “This app may post on your behalf, including articles you read and more.” Ummm, “post on my behalf”? No thank you.

This particular article spawned many comments in the blogosphere about “Facebook oversharing” (Facebook itself calls it “frictionless sharing”). I wonder how many people, who have installed these types of apps, realize that what they read on Yahoo or the Washington Post may get shared with their Facebook friends. I wonder how many changed the “Public” setting before installing. Perhaps it’s not a good thing to let your coworkers know that you are reading up on the latest medical issue you might be experiencing. You think?

Some proactive damage control is called for here. Look through your list of apps that you have given permission to access your Facebook data (Account Settings -> Apps). You might be surprised at what shows up on the list, those apps can be sneaky. Browsing through your Privacy settings is a good idea too. I unchecked the box “My App Activity” for “How people bring your info to apps they use”.

Needless to say, I did not install the Washington Post Social Reader Facebook App – but I did go looking for the original article, which proved difficult to find, even when searching on the Washington Post site. But if you would like to hear DivineCaroline’s take on the article, she’s all over it, and has spread many links to her blog post all over the net. Seems like Google has a ways to go on recognizing original authors.

Maybe Washington Post should investigate the rel author tag rather than relying on this sort of Facebook app for their traffic. And what’s so wrong with allowing a click through to the article even if I say “no thank you” to the app? At least they would get a visit out of me to their site.

Just to quickly recap. When you first create a Facebook fan page, your page will have an ugly looking URL with lots of numbers. The Facebook documentation continues to say that 25 people have to like your page before you can choose your custom username so that you can have a prettier URL for your page.

People have noticed that the 25 like requirement has been lifted before. But it always has been transient. Maybe the limit has been lowered? Or perhaps it is related to the rollout of the Facebook Timeline feature? Whatever it is, there is no guarantee it will last, so give it a try soon.

• Personal Profile pages: March 9, 2012
• Facebook Fan pages: March 30, 2012

Your life is an open book on Facebook Timeline

I used to think of Facebook as a walled garden. Posts I made to my wall would only be seen by my Facebook friends. No more. Not everything shows up on your Facebook Timeline, but that embarrassing post you made 4 years ago? That you’ve forgotten about? It may be on your Timeline. If you haven’t already reviewed your Timeline (whether you have published it or not), you might want to. Mouse over the post (Facebook now calls posts “stories”) and click on the Pencil part of the button that pops up and you will get the option to “hide” it.

Your Facebook Cover Photo

The Timeline format is quite a redesign from the previous format. No curated group of photos in a strip across the top. And that 180 x 540 profile photo on the side? Gone. The most striking feature is the Facebook Cover photo which takes up quite a bit of real estate (850 by 315 pixels – a bigger height than many website header images!). If you don’t choose your cover photo, you get something like the below:

To add a cover photo, click on the add a cover button as shown above. The user interface is almost as picky and unhelpful as the previous profile photo one which had a habit of failing silently. You won’t be able add anything that is less than 399 pixels wide. So if you designed your previous profile photo to match the exact dimensions of 540 pixels high and 180 pixels wide – you are out of luck – Facebook won’t even give you the image as a choice.

My first attempt was to load an image that was 400 pixels wide – which Facebook allowed, but it looked grainy and stretched out. 800 pixels by 200 pixels? It just shows you half of the image and the repositioning interface didn’t work (there’s that failing silently feature). Your best bet is to shoot for an image that is 800 pixels or more and has a height than is .37 of the width. Larger images like your standard camera pic work pretty well as long as you find a portion of the picture that looks good in the 850 x 315 region (so plan on having the top and bottom cut off). BTW, in case it is not obvious (which it wasn’t to me), to change the cover photo, mouse over the cover and you will get a button.

I’m not happy with the image I came up with, the problem is that I’m using images that are better suited for a website header; but given time, I’m sure I can come up with something better to do with all this real estate.

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