How To: Automate Content for Facebook Pages

I’m sure you’ve all heard by now, Facebook Groups are out and Fan Pages are in. If you’ve investigated making the switch, you’ve probably also heard how difficult it is to coax all your ‘group’ members over to your fancy new ‘page’.

That’s one of the reasons we deliberated for so long over whether or not to take the plunge with a SNOBS Page at Facebook. But it’s the second reason which held us back the longest; we didn’t want to make a Page until we felt sure we’d have enough time to keep it updated, relevant and interesting.

Prior to setting up what we currently have in place (what you’re about to learn how to do in this tutorial) we ran snobs.com.au’s RSS feed through Facebook Notes.

DILEMMA: as a growing site our RSS feed can sometimes equal as few as 12 posts per week and minus actual “staff” to help breath life into it, we run a high-risk of looking LAME-O.

SHORT-TERM GOAL: to appear busy, “live” and engaged with readers/fans until we grow LARGE.

SOLUTION: devised by my clever brother Jason; a business owner/manager himself. He’s a little tech-trickier than myself (okay, a lot) and came up with a method I’m going to name automated aggregation. It utilises Twitter, TwitterFeed and the aforementioned Facebook application: Notes.

Before we get started…

A WARNING FROM FACEBOOK: “If you import too many blog posts in a day, you could be blocked from writing or importing new notes.” I’m not sure how many is “too many” but I haven’t been blocked, yet, and do not intend to madly spam SNOBS’ Facebook-Page fans with half-hourly posts. In STEP FIVE of this tutorial we cover feed settings that should help you stay within the rules/guidelines set by Facebook.

STEP ONE: create a new Twitter account

For example, we named ours http://twitter.com/snobstweet. When you’re done setting up, leave the page/your account open in your web browser and open a new tab (or window) for STEP TWO…

STEP TWO: set up a TwitterFeed account

TwitterFeed is designed to automatically deliver updates to your Twitter stream from a number of different sources. For example, a user may want to Tweet about every new article published at their site + every new image they upload at Flickr + fresh videos added to their Vimeo account. You can set up TwitterFeed to automate this which means it also shortens the length of your source URL so the update fits within Twitter’s 140 character limit.

Once you’ve created an account you’ll see a page which looks like the image below. Again, leave your account (and the web page) open while you go search for some RSS feeds relevant to your Facebook Page.

STEP THREE: collecting RSS feeds

In SNOBS case I was after content related to Australian businesswomen, SME’s, web 2.0, women’s health, style etc. But I don’t want too many feeds and don’t want all the content for each topic coming from one source. To create a content feed that looks more like random article selection (each post originating from a different source) my brother introduced me to another great idea…

A) Go to Google News and enter some keywords that describe the kind of items/articles relevant to your business (or topic of your Facebook Page). For example, I searched business + women + SME. You can use ‘advanced search’ to really hone in on precise search results.

B) You can now grab an RSS feed of the customised news search you’ve created. Look for the square, orange RSS icon in the search bar of your web browser, and click on it…

(NOTE: If you’re using Google Chrome you won’t see the icon because Chrome doesn’t have a built-in RSS reader).

When you click the RSS icon you’ll see a page like the one pictured below, and the URL will have changed to look something like this:

http://news.google.com.au/news?pz=1&ned=au&hl=en&q=business+women+SME&output=rss

Next (in STEP FOUR) you’ll need to copy and paste the RSS-version of your news-search-URL into TwitterFeed, but don’t copy it yet! Just leave this window open, and we’ll come back to it…

STEP FOUR: loading feeds into TwitterFeed

Return to the TwitterFeed account page you’ve left open and follow ‘Step 1’ – “connect your feed to your Twitter account”. It will automatically connect to the Twitter account you have open, which should be the new one you’ve just created.

You’ll see the prompt message pictured below. Press “allow”.

This will return you to your TwitterFeed account page where it’s time to start entering feeds. The image below demonstrates our example feed from STEP THREE – where I created an RSS feed for news item related to the keywords: business + women + SME. Name your feed something to help you recognise what it is. This name/title won’t appear anywhere, so call it whatever you like.

STEP FIVE: settings for your feeds

Click on ‘advanced settings’ down the bottom of the page you’re on (see image above). This is where you can give your feed a title that will be displayed on your Facebook page, and in your new Twitter stream.

Update Frequency: Bombarding fans of your Facebook Page with posts is equal to spamming and you probably won’t have them as fans for very long. Worse still, you could get yourself suspended from Facebook, as I mentioned in the intro. To avoid this:

• Set each feed’s Update Frequency for at least an hour apart. All of mine are set to a minimum of 3hrs – and it goes up to 24hrs.

• Vary your Update Frequency between feeds. If they’re all set at 6hrs you will bombard your fans, with big lumps of content in one hit. Better to space them out.

• Keep the number of updates you release at one time (for one feed) low as well. I’m a massive goody two-shoes (I’d be mortified if Facebook suspended me!) so all of my [4] feeds are set to 1 update at a time

TIP: when you’re first setting this up, to make sure the feeds are coming through, set the Update Frequency to 30min (the minimum) so you don’t have to wait for ages to check they’re working. But don’t forget to bump it up soon as you see the feed is in action! After a few days you’ll be able to see exactly how much is fed through from each source and you can adjust Update Frequency again, based on that.

Post Content: Make sure the ‘Post Link’ box is ticked, choose ‘title & description’ (so users can quickly see what the story is about) and my brother recommended TinyURL to shorten the links because no account set up or login is required.

Post Prefix: This is your intro, or title, to prefix what the post is about. I originally set mine as ‘Bus. News’ and updates on my Facebook Page looked like this…

snobstweet: Bus. News Google revamps DoubleClick exchange: Internet heavyweight takes fight to Yahoo.. http://tiny…

But I didn’t like how the prefix and news story title all ran together, so now I write my prefix titles in uppercase. Example: BUS. NEWS | which appears like this…

snobstweet: BUS. NEWS | Google revamps DoubleClick exchange: Internet heavyweight takes fight to Yahoo.. http://tiny…

Post Suffix: I didn’t bother to put an ‘end title’ on my feeds.

Keyword Filter: Didn’t bother with this either.

STEP SIX: waiting for a feed

Once you’ve set up TwitterFeed you’ll need to wait sometimes 30min, or more, for fresh content to fill the RSS feed and be “pulled” (via TwitterFeed) into your new Twitter stream.

As well as setting short Update Frequencies (as mentioned in STEP FIVE) for testing purposes, you can also create a feed that you know will have lots of fresh content, eg. “top stories” in Google news. Once you see its working you can easily delete the test feed.

STEP SEVEN: grab the RSS feed (URL) for your new Twitter account

When it’s all working – your new Twitter account has fresh content arriving from your various TwitterFeeds – log out of the new Twitter account. To grab the RSS feed (URL) for your new Twitter account you need to access the profile from a separate Twitter account.

Once logged into the separate Twitter profile, use ‘Find People’ to locate your new Twitter account – or just type the URL into the address bar. Example, http://twitter.com/snobstweet

In the right sidebar, click on the link ‘RSS feed of xxxxxx tweets’. This is the RSS feed address that you will use in Facebook Notes.

For example, snobstweet RSS feed address (URL) is http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/71799724.rss

STEP EIGHT: correct settings for your Facebook Page

• Log into Facebook and find your fan page. The easiest way is go to the bottom left corner…

• Click on ‘Ads and Pages’

• Then click on ‘Pages’ and you should see yours listed (if not, you either haven’t created a fan page or you created it under a different user login)

• Right below your Page title, click on ‘Edit Page’

• Go to the list of ‘Applications’ and locate ‘Notes’. Click the little pencil icon in the top-right corner of the ‘Notes’ box, and go to ‘Application settings’.

• The pop-up window (see image below) is called Edit Note Settings. Click on the tab: ‘Additional Permissions’ and tick the box next to ‘Publish to streams’. Click ‘OK’. This is a critical step otherwise your fans won’t see your feeds in their own Facebook stream; they’ll have to navigate to your Facebook page and manually find the notes.

STEP NINE: import your RSS feed to Notes

• Click on the little pencil icon again and, this time, click ‘Edit’
• Locate Note settings – to the right side of your screen – and click on ‘Import new blog’ or ‘Edit import settings’ if you already have an RSS feed installed.

• Then paste the RSS feed of your micro-blog (ie. your new Twitter account – mine would be http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/71799724.rss) into the window titled ‘Web URL:’ and ‘Start Importing’.

You might immediately see some feeds being pulled from Twitter, or you may have to wait a few hours for everything to sort itself out.