Blog and Facebook Strategy: 25 Ways to Integrate FB and Your Blogging

25 Ways to Mix Your Blog and Facebook

May 18th, 2009 by Easton Ellsworth

Facebook, the world’s most popular social networking website, can combine with your blog to produce powerful results. I’ve been able to help clients such as Kapalua Resort to mix their blog and Facebook worlds. Here are 25 ways to help your Facebook presence and your blog work together to help your business or organization be more successful.

Import your blog into Facebook.
Start or join a Facebook group that is about the same topic as your blog (but that is not necessarily about your blog).
Create or become a fan of a Facebook page that is relevant to your blog.
Make sure your Facebook profile includes a link to your blog.
On your Facebook Wall, make an update that mentions an article at your blog and invites people to discuss and share it via Facebook and other media.
If you’re up for it, create a Facebook app that has to do with your blog’s subject.
When a person leaves a comment at your blog, look them up in Facebook and add them as a friend. If they’re already a friend, send them a public or private message of appreciation in Facebook.
When someone becomes your friend on Facebook or becomes a supporter of any Facebook groups or pages in your charge, visit their Facebook profile and try to find out if they have a blog elsewhere. Visit any blogs you find and leave thoughtful comments.
Watch your blog’s traffic carefully to see how who is finding it via Facebook.
Consider creating a special welcome page at your blog just for Facebook users. You could include the link to this “welcome Facebookers” page at your Facebook profile page.
Host a special event at your blog (such as a contest or a virtual conference) and invite Facebookers to attend.
Create a Facebook event and invite your blog followers to attend, support and spread it.
Once in a while, publicly ask your Facebook friends and supporters to interact in some way with your blog – give you feedback on how to improve it, answer a question you’ve posed at your blog, leave a comment at your blog, etc.
At your blog, include a link to your Facebook profile and any related pages or groups in your About and/or Contact pages as well as at your homepage (for example, in your sidebar).
Stealth mixing: Given that you have the ability to privately contact Facebook friends and to privately email any commentators at your blog who have left email addresses along with their comments, take some time on a regular basis to just say hi and mention the other half of your blog/Facebook universe.
Consider paying for some Facebook ads that drive traffic to your blog.
Integrate Facebook Connect with your blog.
Add a widget or plugin to your blog that displays some recent updates from your Facebook wall, a Facebook group/page you’re involved with, etc.
Once in a while at your blog, publish an article that talks about Facebook and shares some of your personal progress at FB.
Once in a while at Facebook, post about your blog’s progress.
Remember the power of static pages, which live outside of the regular stream of blog posts. You could, for instance, create a set of several static pages at your blog’s domain that refer to your Facebook efforts. Which leads us to …
Strategy. Ponder the relationship between your Facebook and blogging efforts. How much time are you spending on each? How much time are you spending on your quest to meld your blogging and Facebook thrusts? How much time and energy should you be spending?
Metrics. Track everything you can, particularly those items that relate directly to the combination of Facebook and your blog. The traffic that passes between the two … the links that appear on the Web to each subset … the amount of funds raised or business generated through each subset … etc.
Read and re-read articles like this. And keep looking for them. There are quite a few out there – many more than I’ve linked to here. Make it a point to study relentlessly the ways in which you can leverage Facebook-and-your-blog much better than “Facebook, and, um, your blog.”
Ask for help. You don’t have to do all the mixing on your own. Making Facebook and blog combinations and campaigns work more effectively than the sum of their parts can be extremely challenging.

Along with blog and Facebook mixture, try blog/Twitter mixing, Visionary Blogging-style.

By the way, here’s my Facebook profile. Would love to connect with you there!

How else can you mix your blog with Facebook?

Want ongoing expert advice for your blog or social media campaign?
Get VB Pro now.

10 Comments - Publish a Comment

1. Mary-LynnMay 18, 2009, 9:09 pm

Quick question about importing a blog, because I just stopped importing my blog through notes today. The reason…we also post a podcast with our daily blog. The import notes “rss feed”, only links to an rss view of our blog which does not include the podcast player that you see on our blog. Plus, the rss feed view is contained within Facebook. I will now manually add the audio link (which brings up the audio player button on Facebook) and manually add the link to each particular blog post in that same update. Do you think this is a good strategy for mixing blog/podcast and facebook?
2. Easton EllsworthMay 20, 2009, 7:09 am

Great question, Mary-Lynn! It sounds like it’s worth the extra effort to do it that way, yes. The nice thing about manually linking to your podcast items from Facebook is that you can change the title, etc. from what your feed would automatically generate. You can tailor things a little better just for your Facebook audience.
3. Tony TeegardenJune 2, 2009, 5:09 am

Very good list! One other thing you can add to the list is import your FriendFeed into your Facebook updates. Careful though because if you’re very chatty on something like Twitter your updates can be very “noisy” and turn off some of your friends. Use it sparingly but I love it.

Hope this helps!
4. Jeff BrownJune 2, 2009, 5:09 am

Regarding No. 18, might you have any widgets or plug-ins you could suggest?
5. Easton EllsworthJune 2, 2009, 1:09 pm

Thanks Tony and Jeff for stopping by!

Tony, great tip. FriendFeed is a wonderful tool and importing it into FB can be a great idea. I’m with you on the “noisy” thing.

Jeff, for the backend there’s this plugin. WordPress Jedi has a nice list too. And of course there’s Facebook Connect. I hope those help – let me know if that’s not what you were looking for and I’ll try to find a better solution!
6. SamJuly 25, 2009, 10:09 pm

Thanks — great article. Inspiring!
7. Easton EllsworthJuly 25, 2009, 10:09 pm

You’re very welcome Sam! Nice blog you’ve got!
8. SamJuly 25, 2009, 10:09 pm

What’s your opinion on importing blog into Facebook notes? I did it for awhile and then stopped — thinking maybe it’s better to use FB to drive traffic to blog and bring the blog to FB.

I’ve had the website ten years and just recently made it a blog rather than static, never-changing website.
9. Easton EllsworthJuly 25, 2009, 10:09 pm

You’ve had the site for 10 years? Awesome.

I think it’s not for everybody. If you import anything from your blog into Facebook, you might annoy people who are already actively reading or are subscribed to your blog, because they’re getting hit by double the amount of updates. However, many bloggers will find an increase in engagement and traffic and conversations by importing their blogs into their FB Notes.

There’s a lot to be said for keeping the importing to a manual habit, though. If you can remember to do it regularly, it might help you cut down on the risk that some people may get annoyed. Like if your Facebook friends are mostly dog lovers but on your blog you post photos of your cat all the time.
10. Sameh KhanOctober 29, 2009, 9:09 pm

What think you of Disqus?
I recently started using it on my blog. It seems to have connections to all major networks. However, it says that it uses Facebook Connect, yet when i tried to integrate Facebook Connect on its own, I was a bit confused an stuck. Installing this seemed all too easy, so what I’m asking is, is it the same thing?

Thanks for the list, great help.

PS: Sorry about commenting on this post so late after it’s ‘death’. You might need to re-read your own post to remember what it was about