Meeting your customers in the medium THEY are most comfortable with is a cornerstone of good eMarketing.  Since Facebook is the largest social website on the internet you will inevitably decide that your products or services need a presence there. You’ll set up a Facebook Page and suddenly have this new medium that needs regular updating with content and monitoring for interactions. You know, the whole “social” part of social marketing. What you need is a way that automates the distribution of your content to facebook pages. So what are you waiting for? Lets get started!

This article assumes that you already have a Facebook account, created a Page (If you haven’t, go create a Facebook page!), and are logged in.

Get the RSS Graffiti Application

1. At the bottom left corner, click “Applications> Browse More Applications
2. In the Search box type in, RSS Graffiti and press ENTER. Click on the RSS Graffiti image and it will take you to the RSS Graffiti Facebook Page.
3. Under the the Image on the left side you will see “add to my Page” a window will pop up and display all of the Pages that you are responsible for. Click on the ones you want to add RSS Graffiti to.
4. Go back to the bottom left corner, click “Applications> RSS Graffiti. Click on the Page that you want to add RSS Graffiti to (It will have a grey icon next to it)
5. You should see a status that reads, “Page Status: Not enabled” and a big blue button, “Click here to add RSS Graffiti to this Facebook Page. (If you don’t see the button, try refreshing your page. I had this problem and a refresh helped)
6. Next you’ll have to grant publishing permission, (again, if you don’t see the option try to refresh the page.) then click on the big blue button, “Click here to rant stream publishing permission.” and the click on the “allow publishing” button.
7. Now you can click the green, “+ add feed” button so lets add some feeds!

Status updates

An important part of Facebook is the Status Update. The small input form at the top of the page that is supposed to answer the question, “What’s on your mind?” Think of this as the same kind of micro-blog as Twitter or Friend feed and while your thinking of it, wouldn’t it be nice if those feeds would automatically update your facebook status?

1. Go to your twitter page. (mines http://twitter.com/LaryStucker) scroll down and on the right hand column you will see RSS feeds of LaryStucker’s tweets.click on it and you will get a URL, http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/11821852.rss
2. Add your twitter feed to the Feed URL and give it a name to easily identify it, you know something catchy like, Twitter Feed.
3. Under “Handle as” choose “Status updates”
4. Under “Title” choose, same as item’s title. I figure if you took the time to give the original item a good title, why change it now.
5. Click, “save”

News and Post Updates

When you have more substantial things to say about your products or services you probably do so on a blog or news portion of your website. (Either of those publications should have an RSS feed, if they don’t, what’s wrong with you? You seriously need to update your site to include RSS feeds.) If their important enough to say to your blog/ news audience than your Facebook fans should want to know about it too!

1. Go grab the RSS feed from your blog or news site. (I use feed burner to syndicate this blog: freshclicks.net)
2. Add it to the Feed URL and give it a name to easily identify it, like “FreshClicks Blog”
3. Under “Handle as” choose “Generic Feed”
4. Under “Title” choose, same as item’s title. I figure if you took the time to give the original item a good title, why change it now.
5. Click, “save”

That’s all there is to it! Now your Facebook Page will start filling up with your content automatically, the only thing you have to do now is monitor the responses. I wonder if there is a way to do that automatically…