Businesses “Like” Facebook.

Love or Hate Facebook, it is great way for businesses to connect with people.

I’m asked a lot of questions about Facebook. Here is one I asked myself, “How can we put a Facebook Like button on our web sites?”

I encourage you to ask yourself the same question, and to listen to how I answered myself. ~:-)

Before we get ahead of ourselves on the “how” let’s take a look at the “what” and the “why”. The infamous “like” button is the mechanism that allows you to follow Pages on Facebook. When someone clicks on the like button, your Business page has a new follower. As we work to get more followers, the logical question is how do we get more people that like us to click on the “like” button.

If they are on your Facebook page they can click the button. But, we need to give them more opportunities to click elsewhere. To see what I’m talking about, you can visit ValleyBugler.com and omOriginals.com. Each site has a different button. The Bugler site sports the traditional like button. Click on it, you can always Unlike if change your mind. On omOriginals.com we have what is called a like box, it has the button AND it also shows icons of some of our followers. I double dog dare you to click on the like button.

Pause: You need a few things to add the “like” button on your site.
1) A Facebook Business Page, 2) A web site you can edit

If you don’t have BOTH on you should step away from this article and get a FB Page and/or Web site. Don’t be afraid to hire a geek. It is well worth it and will save you many grey hairs.

Now – how can we add the like button on our websites?

Logon to your FB Page. You are going to need your FB URL.

This is the address for your facebook page. FYI – Unless you shortened your URL it is likely a big long ugly thing. I can teach you how to shorten it, but that is for another day. ~:-)

So select the whole address and copy it.

Then point your browser to http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like (no hyphens)

Where it says, Enter your “URL to Like”, paste in your address.

Moments later you will see a preview of your creation to the right.

You can click on the “Get Code” button and put the code in your page OR you can customize your button. Here is some info about the customization option. “Layout Style” allows you to determine how much social content is showed in your button. You can now have it show faces (like on omOriginals.com) You can also adjust the width to best fit your web site. You can also chose if you wish for it to say like or recommend. Just two more variables to go, choose a font and color scheme. Now click “get code”.

You will be given two code options. You can use and iFrame or XFBML. You can try both or contact your favorite geek to see which one is best for your web site setup.

Now copy that text and paste it into your web site. Click on Save or Publish and check out your site.

Feel a little geeky. Try a Like Box or Live Stream. They are pretty cool. They both require your Facebook Page ID. Here is a trick to find your ID.

Go to your FB Page and right click on your logo – Select Properties. For the address you will see something like. profile=1&id=133685112674. The id is the full number.

I hope to see you on Facebook!

God Bless,
Oscar Myre IV

Oscar Myre IV is the owner and Creative Director of omOriginals Marketing, a Longview based web development and graphic marketing firm. Call them at (360)575-9839 or online @ omOriginals.com, also on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Become a ‘Fan’ today!