How To: Pull Your Blog Posts Into Facebook

On Tuesday, I moderated and sat on a panel of bloggers who write for the Indiana Insider Blog, which I manage for work. We had a good discussion and the audience members had some great questions ranging from blogging best practices to FourSquare and the future of social media. The focus of the panel was on blogging, but Facebook was brought up during the session as well. It got me thinking about a best practice for Facebook Pages – feeding your blog posts through to Facebook. It’s a relatively straight-forward process, but there are many different ways to feed your blog content through to Facebook.

There are a multitude of apps that will pull in your feed as well as Facebook’s Notes app, so I’ll go through some of the most popular ways to pull in your Facebook content and give you the pluses and minuses of each.

I’ll detail Facebooks Notes App, the RSS Graffiti and Networked Blogs apps and Hootsuite after the jump…

Facebook’s Notes App

This app comes preloaded on your Personal Facebook account as well as on your business’ page. When you’re editing on the back end of your Facebook Page, click on Edit under the Notes icon, then click on Import A Blog on the right side of the page. From here, you can enter your blog’s website or RSS feed. Now your blogs will be fed through to your Facebook page soon after they’re published. Positives:

• Very easy and quick to set up.
• Pulls in thumbnail version of first image used on blog.
• Keeps everything contained within Facebook – the title clickthru goes to the full post in the Facebook Notes section, allowing Facebook members to comment and Like your post.
• Post is sharable – see previous post about sharing via Facebook.

Negatives:

• Everything is contained within Facebook – a link to the post on your blog is hidden within the full post in your Notes section.
• Notes is a very inflexible system. The only option you have is whether or not to use it.

RSS Graffiti

RSS Graffiti has become Social Mediarology’s blog feed app of choice. It’s fairly easy to set up and manage and does exactly what we want a blog feed app to do.

You can set up this application by going to facebook.com/RSS.Graffiti and clicking on Add to my Page. From there, setup is pretty simple. Just go fill out the information for your blog (either the URL or your RSS Feed), fill out a few preferences and your posts will start feeding through to Facebook! Positives:

• Fairly easy and quick to set up.
• Pulls in thumbnail version of first image used on blog.
• Pushes user directly to your blog to read the rest of the post.
• Allows you to set how frequently the app checks to see if you have new posts. I have it set to “As Soon As Possible”.
• Application easily manages multiple blogs and allows for posting to your personal profile as well as any pages or groups that you manage.
• Post is sharable – see previous post about sharing via Facebook.

Negatives:

• Slightly more difficult to set up.
• Pushes user directly to your blog to read the rest of the post – this could be a negative if you want to keep fans on your Facebook page, but I view it as a good thing.

Networked Blogs

Networked Blogs is one of the more popular blog feed apps on Facebook today and it has some great networking features built in. You can install a Networked Blogs widget on your blog and readers can easily click to follow your posts. When you install Networked Blogs, you can also follow other blogs within their network. It’s a nice way to stay up-to-date on your favorite blogs.

Just like with RSS Graffiti, visit facebook.com/networkedblogs and click Add to my Page to get started. Here’s where it gets a bit more confusing. While Networked Blogs offers many features, I found it extremely difficult to navigate and do even simple things like edit my feed, determine whether the feed would get pulled to my personal profile or fan page. Once you figure out the process, it’s not too bad, but there’s a fairly steep learning curve with Networked Blogs.

Positives:

• Pulls in thumbnail version of first image used on blog, or a screenshot of the blog if there are no images in the post.
• Pushes user directly to your blog to read the rest of the post.
• Gives you a Networked Blogs page on Facebook where you can keep up with your other favorite blogs.
• Application manages multiple blogs and allows for posting to your personal profile as well as any pages you manage.
• Post is sharable – see previous post about sharing via Facebook.
• Appends Tweet This and Follow Blog links to the update so you can easily share the post outside of Facebook.

Negatives:

• Significantly more difficult to set up.
• Does not allow you to set how frequently the app checks to see if you have new posts. Networked Blogs manages this based on the number of followers you have. It can vary from once in 24 hours to every half-hour.
• Pushes user directly to your blog to read the rest of the post – this could be a negative if you want to keep fans on your Facebook page, but I view it as a good thing.

HootSuite

I use HootSuite to manage multiple social media initiatives and enjoy its ease of use and robust features. In fact, I do use Hootsuite to push my blog posts through to Twitter, but other apps do a better job in pushing blog posts to Facebook.

When you’ve set up your Facebook account and fan page in Hootsuite, simply click on the Settings, then RSS/Atom tabs and add a new feed. You can add multiple feeds and you can specify which accounts you want them pushed through to. It’s very simple to set up and once you’ve done it, you shouldn’t have to go in and modify it. You can definitely set it and forget it.

Positives:

• Very easy and quick to set up.
• Pushes the user directly to your blog to read each post.
• If you use HootSuite’s ht.ly links, you can see robust analytics for each post.
• If you already use HootSuite, this is a great way to manage just about everything with one program.

Negatives:

• No thumbnails pulled in, just any prepended text you specified, the blog title, the beginning of the post and a link.
• This is the simplest-looking post of the ones mentioned.
• Post is not sharable – see previous post about sharing via Facebook – it just appears as a link within update copy.

Recap

There are many ways to feed your blog into Facebook, but whichever method you use, be sure you do pull your blog feed into Facebook. It’s a great way to give your fans and friends relevant content. Do you use any of these methods to feed your blogs into Facebook or do you use something else?