Adding Your Blog to Your Facebook Company (Fan) Page

Linking your social media platforms together can help you communicate more efficiently.  One way to do this is to insert your blog feed into your Facebook business page (or "fan" page, as it used to be called).

There are several approaches to linking your blog with Facebook.  You can set up your blog to post a status update on your Facebook wall whenever you publish an article.  In turn, these posts find their way into your friends' news feeds.  (Technically, I guess they should be called "likers" rather than "friends".  But that just doesn't sound right.  Let's borrow form Twitter and call them "followers".)  Posting to your Facebook wall whenver you blog is a great idea, but those wall posts tend to fade away pretty quickly as new posts push them down the list.  And keep in mind that your followers might not see those in their news feed if they aren't looking at the right time.

Another method is to create a completely new blog section on your facebook page.  With an application called "blog tab", you can do this.  The end product creates a "Blog" link below the links to your info, photos, and walls link on your business profile page. That link takes you to a page within Facebook showing a feed of all your blog posts, with teasers and links to the full articles.

This is pretty easy.  Let's see how it's done.

First, go to the Facebook Apps Directory.  Once there, type "blog tab" in the search box on the left.

The first app in the list ought to be "Blog Tab".  That's the one you want.

You're now at the Blog Tab page.  Press "Go to App".

You will get a permission request that resembles the following.  Press "Allow".

On the following page, enter your blog's RSS feed address and press "Add Blog".

Next, press, the "Pages" tab.

Select the appropriate business / fan page to which you wish to add your blog, and then press "Authorize".

That's it.  You should now see "Blog" in your navigation column on your business page.

Whenever dealing with anything related to Facebook, it should be noted that things change quickly.  For example, the app we used is called "Blog Tab".  This app was created when Facebook still had tabs on business pages.  They no longer do.

Facebook changes their UI all the time.  One the one hand, it's great that they're evolving, and I find most of their changes to be positive.  Let's face it, Facebook has evolved from something fairly simple... where much of what you entered was just thrown as text into their database.  As a developer, it's not easy transitioning from that to a versatile platform where everything is related and normalized in the database.

That having been said, Facebook does have a reputation for not quite getting the UI right the first time.  The day-to-day functions that users use constantly (reading feeds, sharing photos, and posting) is fairly straight forward.  But finding settings and adding apps can sometimes be very frustrating.  We find ourselves clicking lots of random links until we find what we need.  And for me, that usually ends with a statement like, "Well, that wasn't where it was yesterday."

So, if you find that this article has become out of date, please leave a comment here, and I'll update it.