So far my blog has been completely about my printing.  However, before I owned a printer, Online with Design was all about web and graphic design.  One of the things that is necessary in this online world of ours is to be able to present ourselves to as many people as possible in as many different places as possible.

One which seems to be causing a lot of people problems is how to get your business blog to feed automatically into your facebook fan page.  Shouldn’t be too complex you think to yourself, it’s pretty straight forward when you’re doing your personal one!  Alas, facebook in all it’s glorious wisdom thought it would be far more fun, to complicate things!

1. First go to your fan page and click on “edit page” under your logo/picture on the top left.

Click on edit page

2. The page you’re now on shows all the backstage settings for your fan page/business page.  If you scroll down the page, you should find a section for notes.  Click on the edit button in the notes section:

Click on edit under notes

3. You will most likely see it saying “yourpagename hasn’t written any notes… yet”, or you may see a list of notes that were written directly into facebook.  To the right of the page there is a double box with note settings and subscribe to notes.  Click on the import notes links under note settings:

Click on import notes under note settings

4. In the next part you need to enter the web address to your blog.  It doesn’t need to be the RSS feed or anything technical.  Just the full address of your blog as if you were give it to a colleague to find.  For example mine would be http://www.onlinewithdesign.co.uk/blog    Don’t forget to tick the box that says you have the right to reproduce the content, and then click on start importing.

Enter your blog address, tick the box and click on import

5. 2 things could happen here:
a) it will show a preview of your blog posts showing it’s worked, in which case, click on the confirm import and move onto part 6.
b) it will show import failed.  There are several reasons this could happen.  1, you didn’t put your address in correctly.  Check your typing, try putting what you’ve typed directly into your web browser and check it takes you to your blog.  If it does, then check it’s feeding correctly, by going to the facebook suggested feed validator: http://www.feedvalidator.org/ If it’s showing as working in the validator, then it’s facebook glitching, which has been happening a lot recently!  If it’s facebook then stop pulling your hair out and come back to it in a couple of hours, maybe facebook will be working by then

6. Your posts should now be showing on your pages, you just need to be able to allow people to read your notes anytime they like, not just when you have a new import.  So you need to add the tab on the home page of your fan page.  Just click on the + tab next to your other tabs (such as wall, info, photos) and in the drop down box, select notes.

Select the +tab and click on notes

If you can’t find the option for notes in the drop down menu (it’s only happened to me once), then go back to the edit page link at the top of the page (as in part 1) and find the notes section.  This time click on application settings, in the new window that opens, in the row for Tab: click on the (add) link after it says available.  When you return to the main fan page, it should now show your notes tab, and any important blog posts

One final word of warning, although facebook says it will import update with any new posts within 4 hrs, this isn’t always the case, it has been known to take as much as 24hrs!  This may only be a temporary hiccup or it may be an ongoing issue, it’s hard to tell.  I hope this post has been of some help to those of you looking to integrate your various online personas, do let me know how you get on and and also if there’s any similar things you need help with!