Social Media Marketing: Facebook On Your Website

Social media marketing includes your customers sharing information with their friends. Facebook (FB) makes it easy to share pages created on their site, but what if you want to let people share items on your website?

Facebook Makes It Easy

They have an online tool to create a "I Like This" button (widget) to place on your web page. The tool makes it easy to build code, although they give you very few choices.

To place the code on your website will require some editing. But it is not difficult if you are familiar with HTML.

To building an Facebook "Like" button you don't even need an account with them, although I would suggest that you have one.

Building Your Button

Follow these simple steps:

• Go to this URL: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like

•  Fill out the form displayed on the page.  Remember to include "http://" in the URL
• Click on the "Get Code" button. Copy and paste the "iframe" code onto your webpage.

Facebook tries to maintain a consistent "look" to their buttons, but they still offer a few options to choose from when you build your button.

Layout Style:
Between the two choices (standard or button_count), if you are trying to fit the button into a small space, I'd choose button_count. (The next graphic will show what these two layouts look like.)

Show Faces:
FB has it on by default, but in most cases I think it should be off.

Width:
Choose what will fit in your page's layout. If you choose too narrow of a width using the "Standard" layout style the text of the buttons will wrap.

To prevent the text from wrapping choose a width greater than 270 for "Like" and 350 for "Recommend" (see next display option).

Verb to Display:
You choices are Like and Recommend.
 I'm not sure if it makes any difference in the number of clicks you will get but for product or service pages I think "Recommend" is the stronger choice, for general informational pages I'd suggest "Like".

If you know of any studies done on these two choices please post a link to them in the comments, I'd be interested to read your results.

Font:
Facebook offers six common font choices  - stay away from Veranda. It tends to have wider character spacing compared to the other five choices. The widget's text can overflow if you choose "count button" as your layout style and Veranda as your font, as shown in the next graphic.

Color Scheme:
You can have any color scheme you want, as long as it is either "Light" or "Dark".

Sharing Webpages: Other Buttons and Widgets

Facebook is not the only service that provides links to let your visitors share interesting pages they have found.

• You probably have seen the Tweetmeme.com retweet button. 
• Twitter launched it's own Tweet button in August 2010. 
• Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and other social book marking sites offer their own widgets.
• AddThis and ShareThis let your users post your page to several social bookmarking sites at once.

Be aware that some of these services such as AddThis might collect information about your users sharing habits and could market it to advertisers.

Adding Facebook Buttons to WordPress

If you have a blog or website built with WordPress, a good starting point is this Mashable article that describe a few methods to add FB "Like" buttons to WordPress sites.

Deciding What To Do

For most websites I'd say to stick with either Facebook, Twitter (or tweetmeme) and a general sharing links such as AddThis or ShareThis.

If you know your audience primarily uses one of the social bookmarking sites (Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon) then that site's widget would also be a good choice.

Remember the idea behind social media marketing is to make it easy for your customers to be social  - sharing and talking about your products and services.