facebook

Increasing Facebook users

0
131 days
by in facebook, Uncategorized

Together with two of my former collegues I have started a new agency under the name Artcore Society. We offcourse have a page on Facebook, which people can “like”. When I have some freetime I am looking into things that could increase the fanbase.

Without being too braggy I know our work is more than decent enough to run with the big dogs: it’s just so that reaching everybody is a hard job. It’s also noteworthy that not everybody you know is a fan of your work. The trick is too find all the people that would like your work and let them like your page.

A few things that have helped our cause are these:

Put it on your own website/mailsignature/msn window
Kind of logical, but often overlooked. Your friends and readers will only find it logical that there are links to your own company website. It’s what you do. As long as you do not jam it in their throat they will not take offence.

Invite your subscribers
If you have an email base which you use to send newsletters, let them know about it with a small infoblock. Most likely the receivers have Facebook and are more than happy to like your page to get more news from you.

Create an attractive page
Make sure your page looks okay: nice logo in the profile picture area, fangate that explains what you do and what you can offer, relevant information, well-designed and easy to understand subpages, etc… you could even ask us to do it for you. ;)

Ask already-likers to join in on the quest for more likes
Why not organize an online “contest” that asks the users to tag your brand in their pictures? It generates buzz on their wall which might lead to more likes. If people see your brand on Facebook and like the product they will like your page aswell. You could do small contests, give-aways, … the fangate (ex.: like us and get the chance…) makes sure they like the page before they see the contest information.

Make a small print ad about the page in real life
A small sign in your office/store reminds the people that you have a Facebook page: if they remember this while they’re browsing Facebook they might add your page to their likes.


The growth will offcourse depend on what kind of company/product you try to like, but these small things could already help alot. If the people don’t know about it, they won’t be able to like it.

Facebook fangate: a how-to with PHP

1
161 days
by in facebook, snippets

The problem:
You have some awesome content on your facebook page, but you want visitors to like your page before they can read it, aka installing a fangate! No worries, PHP is our friend and this example can be set-up in under five minutes! You can do this with javascript too, but we over at Murten Saerbi choose the PHP way.


Woah… wait! What’s a fangate?
A fangate is actually just a page that checks whether a certain visitor is a fan of your page or not. Therefore this script will only work when you load it in a page. You can do this by creating a new app over on developers.facebook.com and adding the app to your page. The custom pages on Facebook are actually *just* HTML/PHP/… pages that Facebook loads into an iframe.

Like that it looks the content of your website is actually on Facebook inside a custom page tab.


The solution:
First you will need to download the php sdk file, you can do this over at GitHub. Next step is to actually create a php file that you can use as the fangate page. Open up the php tags and start with the base: requiring the file we just downloaded (don’t forget to upload!) and filling in the app id and the app secret. You can find these variables on your application setting screen on developers.facebook.com. Your file should look a bit like this:

<?php
 
require 'facebook.php';
 
$app_id = "your_app_id_here"; 
$app_secret = "your_app_secret_here";
$facebook = new Facebook(array(
        'appId' => $app_id,
        'secret' => $app_secret,
        'cookie' => true
));

After this all we really need is a parameter that tells us if a visitor likes the page he’s viewing or not. You can find this in the signed_request object, a Facebook object that holds various information about the page and the user. Get that object and read out the page_liked parameter:

<?php
$signed_request = $facebook->getSignedRequest();
 
$like_status = $signed_request["page"]["liked"];

When we have the like status inside a variable the rest is easy, a simple if statement will give us the ability to feed the visitor two content pages: one if the user doesn’t like our page yet and one if the user does like our page. That’s about it: easy peasy lemon squeezy! Just don’t forget to close the php code after the if and you’re all set:

if ($like_status) {
echo "<div style='margin-top:0px; position: absolute; top:0px;left:0px; width:520px; height:750px;'>
    <iframe src='HTTP://_THE_PAGE_THAT_NEEDS_TO_BE_SHOWN_WHEN_PEOPLE_LIKE' width='520' height='751' frameborder='0' scrolling='no'></iframe>
</div>";
} else {
echo "<div style='margin-top:0px; position: absolute; top:0px;left:0px; width:520px; height:750px;'>
  <iframe src='HTTP://_THE_PAGE_THAT_NEEDS_TO_BE_SHOWN_WHEN_PEOPLE_DONT_LIKE' width='520' height='751' frameborder='0' scrolling='no'></iframe>
</div>";
}
 
?>

Online you should now have atleast four files:

- the facebook.php file
- the fangate php file (index.php for instance)
- the file that people see when they’re not a fan yet
- the file that people see when they’re a fan

It’s that easy, really: so open up your favourite texteditor and start fan-gating away!

Fan page Facebook applications with authentication

0
161 days
by in facebook

The problem:
Applications that run on a page (“add application to page” on the app profile page) and require authentication (certain permissions being set) don’t open the permissions panel -OR- are redirecting to the app canvas page instead of the fan page tab where your application resides after you allow permissions. Let me make that as clear as I can by breaking this sentence down so nobody gets lost in translation:

1. You have an app that runs on a page and therefore only selected the “Page tab” option in the developers panel.
2. Your app needs authentication, meaning: your app requires certain permissions.
3. The Permission box does not appear when you ask for permissions -OR- the permissions box does not redirect you to the page tab.


The solution:
I spent the better part of the day looking for a solution for this, without result. There are some posts about this problem, but no decent answers. What seems to be wrong is when you only select the “page tab” option in the developer panel (developers.facebook.com > select your app) the app doesn’t redirect to the authentication page. When you add the “Website” option however, the app does go to the authentication page!

The only problem now is that the redirect url is the one that you filled in in the “website” option. This is an easy fix, in your integration of your permission screen just fill in whatever page you want to redirect too like this (javascript, since I implement the page with the facebook javascript SDK):

var APP_ID = "my_app_id_that_you_don't_get";
var REDIRECT_URI = "YOUR_PAGE_HERE";
var PERMS = "publish_stream"; //comma separated list, I only need publish

Now this will only work for one fan page, since we hardcode the fan page in the redirect uri. if others add the application to their page they will be redirected to your page instead of their own. Totally cool for you, but not so user-friendly. Offcourse, I have a solution for that too:

var APP_ID = "my_app_id_that_you_don't_get";
var REDIRECT_URI = document.location.href;
var PERMS = "publish_stream";

Much thanks goes out to my loyal testrabbit: Artcore Society‘s own Robby Carlier.

note: Accessing another domain from within an IFRAME is a security violation and will not be accepted by most browsers. You should disregard the last portion for now and insert the REDIRECT_URI hardcoded. I’ll look for a solution and post my findings.

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