Facebook is the leading social networking site. Many organizations are establishing a presence on Facebook in order to engage their constituents in new and innovative ways. Facebook has made it easy to connect with and interact with your Facebook page and your members. There are many widgets and APIs to choose from, depending upon what you'd like to accomplish. A summary of them can be found here. We'll touch on a few of them.
Share Button
An easy way to get exposure is to add a share button to your site, such as this one: Share
The share button takes just minutes to add, yet is quite powerful. By clicking on it from your site, Facebook users can post your website to their wall in two clicks (one click on your site, and one click to confirm the posting). You can choose to share your entire site, or a specific page. Simple instructions can be found here.
Page Badge
A page badge allows you to share your page information and link to it from any other site - your home page, blog, and other social networking sites. It gives a small amount of descriptive information for you display:
A simple wizard for creating your page badge can be found here.
Fan Box
A fan box allows users to become a fan of your page from where ever you post the box. You can also slightly customize it to show a shapshot of your current fans and/or you recent wall stream.
A simple wizard for creatign the fan box is here.
Fan Badge
A fan badge allows you to show off being a fan for an organization (such as your own or a partner's) and can allow someone to become a fan of your page from whereever you place the badge. Here is a working example of the Green Moon fan badge (go ahead, become a fan!):
A simple wizard for creating your fan badge can be found here. You can edit the resulting code to change the name of the fan, delete it, or say something else in that area. It's completely customizeable.
Facebook Connect
Facebook Connect is a more advanced way of interacting with Facebook. For example, you can allow members to use their Facebook credentials to register for events on your site. The concept is a bit more complicated, so we will cover in another article. Stay tuned!