Posts Tagged ‘Facebook’
Facebook dilemma – social or business?
October 26, 2011 | 
Author Up until now I have only really used facebook for socialising with actual friends that I actually know and generally have met. This seems to put me in a minority. Until recently there wasn’t really the choice about who saw what. Friends had access to everything unless you spent ages creating custom lists for things like photos and such like.
Luckily facebook seem to have implemented some half decent privacy controls with easy access to altering how you interact. I have changed all my content to be custom so that I can exclude more casual acquaintances. This is particularly useful as some people you have more of a business relationship with so you don’t really want to see all those embarrassing school photos or other content which you wouldn’t generally talk to them about. This way you can mix business and social life with fewer problems.
I still wouldn’t allow current work colleagues or clients on facebook as one careless word could be the end of more than just a facebook friendship…
Automagically publishing to facebook revisited
For some time it has been easy to tweet new blog posts. If you want to do the same with facebook then it seemed to require either setting up a shell of an application to install to post with or letting an application have rather a lot of access to your facebook information. I have recently been on the lookout for another plugin that will do it easily and quickly. Facebook page publish requires an application to be created so that was binned immediately. I also tried one which involved linksalpha but the list of abilities it wanted was quite long. I wasn’t sure it really need access to so much facebook information. That was quickly deleted. It was also annoying as it required a minimum 8 character password and seemed to be very slow in creating an account.
I also had a look at wordsocial. That didn’t seem to want to have quite as many rights as linksalpha’s. It was really simple to set up but there remains the nagging doubt of having a service that is embedded into a blog via a plugin.
I then returned back to twitterfeed which I use for updating twitter and added a facebook wall publish too. Saves a lot of bother as it means only one place to check! I have tried several other automated tweeters, plugins for wordpress and the like but twitterfeed seems to be the easiest to use and maintain so I am sticking with it for now.
Posted in Computing & Technology | 
Tags: Facebook, publish, twitter, twitterfeed, wordpress | 
Comments Closed
WPBook – make your blog appear on Facebook!
Do you want to increase the readership of your blog? Finding a way to promote within Facebook and your current network is a good way of doing just this. There is a great plugin called WPBook which allows you to connect your normal wordpress blog in such a way that it appears as regular Facebook content so you can easily share it with friends and gain fans. The adage in social media at the moment is ‘go where the people are’ and virtually everyone is on Facebook. Twitter is ok for blog promotion but it is great to find a way of having your blog appear to be within your network rather than external to it.
To set it up, the best way is to follow the ‘detailed’ instructions available with the plugin. In essence you want to create an application with Facebook first. Then you fill in the API keys and page name of the application within the plugin settings. Then you have to allow the plugin access to your profile and the application. This is the trickier bit. If you don’t get the right page name and profile id it won’t work. If you have the initial settings incorrect then the granting permissions part will not work properly so you won’t be able to find out the information you need as Facebook tends to throw you back a blank page. Some diagnostics would be useful here as if you are new to this then you are going to be scratching around trying to work out just where you have made a mistake.
It took me an hour or two after installing the plugin. Had I noticed the link to the ‘detailed’ instructions first I think I would have managed it much more quickly. But I played around with a few settings and found out several ways it wouldn’t work 
Considering I had never built a Facebook application before this evening or even registered as a Developer it is quite amazing what you can do with only a small amount of knowledge.
