TokenBird's Musings

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.