In this article I’m going to tell you how you can replicate the contents that we publish on our website to our company's page on Facebook.
Facebook, currently one of the largest social networks, is also a space for marketing and advertising. Among the activities that we can perform, there's the possibility of creating pages for companies, thus providing a new communication channel between your company and potential clients.
If you already have a page on Facebook, you need to keep it up to date so as to encourage users to visit it, in the same way that you need to update your website. The problem here is that we're facing duplicated maintenance tasks. Most likely there are news articles that should be published in both places, so it would be useful to publish the article on the website and have it automatically replicated to Facebook.
How can we do this with GXportal? We will use GXportal’s content publication feature using RSS and Facebook’s Notes application.
The first thing to do is define what contents of our website we want to have replicated to Facebook. If we already have a content GXportlet that displays news articles, the first step would be to enable publication using RSS of that GXportlet. Otherwise, we can create a page in GXportal with a content GXportlet created for that purpose. If you are not sure about how to enable the publication of contents using RSS,
click here and follow the steps indicated in the section called “How to publish contents in RSS format with GXportal.”
Once we have published the contents in GXportal, try consuming them with your browser by clicking on the RSS button displayed in the upper part of the GXportlet. The window that is opened shows the contents published with RSS. Copy this window’s URL because we will use it later.
Now we should make Facebook consume the contents of the URL above and publish them on the page's wall. To do so, follow the steps below:
• On the Facebook page, go to "Edit page" and add the "Notes" application. To do this, go to "More applications"->"Browse more" and in the search applications box enter "Notes." Click on the application and next on "Add to page."
• Go back to the page view (this task is not immediate because right now Facebook displays our personal profile, not the company's page) and enter "Edit page" again.
• Now you should have the "Notes" application in the application list. Click on the application’s "Edit" option.
• In the section called "Notes Settings," click on "Edit import settings."
• In "Web URL," enter the URL that we copied above and press the "Start Import" button.
• Facebook shows us a preview of the contents to be imported. Click on "Continue."
That’s it!! Now our contents are also displayed on our page’s wall. Every two hours, Facebook checks whether new contents have been published on our website and if that's the case, it publishes them on the wall.
It’s important that the contents that we enter in GXportal have a summary, because the Facebook wall will show that title and summary. Also, the link to our website is included to read the entire article. What's really useful about this is that users can also comment and share the news that we publish, and if they do this, their friends will view the comment in their own walls, increasing our article's visibility.
 Daniel Mariño, GXportal Developer at Artech. |
* Published on GXportal's blog