Several weeks ago, a widgets center went live on Facebook, where users could create widgets for their blogs or websites. These included both widgets for individuals’ profiles, such as the profile badge, and widgets for businesses’ fan pages, such as the fan box and share functionality.
Now, Facebook users can create a fan badge to promote pages they are fans of. Your most loyal fans will gobble this right up. And what blogger doesn’t like filling up their left sidebar with useless widgets?
Just kidding.
Here’s what the tool to generate a fan badge looks like:
All the user has to do is select the fan page of his choice and copy/paste the code somewhere on his website. It’s extremely simple. If you manage a fan page, you can drive your fans to this badge creator with their page preselected by choosing the page from the drop down and copy/pasting the URL. It will look like this: http://www.facebook.com/facebook-widgets/fanbadges.php?page_id=128257327553
You know you want to click it. (You might have to become a fan of U Stand Out first, but you know you want to do that, too.)
Again, this is extremely simple stuff, but you have to know it exists. Facebook is pretty good at keeping this stuff hidden; they promoted the functionality yesterday, but pulled the promo soon after.
Fan badges are a great way to get those loyal fans to drive traffic (and more fans) to your fan page.
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I totally agree, this is a bit ridiculous. I just started coming here because I honestly enjoy helping people and making people smile.
I am having trouble with this fan badge….is there a way to make it simple and easy for a fan to just click on from our fan page so they may add the fan badge to their site?
Thank you,
Lisa
I am having trouble with the fan badge. Is there a way to have an area on our fan page that our fans can click and create the badge easily on their page?
Thank you,
Lisa
Hello Lisa!
Yes, there is a very simple way! What is the link to your Facebook fan page? Here's how I would do it:
1. Go to this page: http://www.facebook.com/facebook-widgets/fanbad…
2. In the drop-down menu “Select a Page”, select your fan page. For the sake of this example I've chosen my own fan page for this blog.
3. Look at the URL bar. You'll see that your page ID has been added to the end of the fanpadges.php URL. For example, mine is http://www.facebook.com/facebook-widgets/fanbad…. This will now be the link that you can share with your fans!
4. You can shorten this link with a URL shortener such as bit.ly to publicize the link to your fans via a status update or Twitter tweet.
5. Create an FBML tab or sidebar box to encourage your fans to create a fan badge, and direct them to your unique URL.
I'm going to create a blog post about this, since several people have contacted me to ask this question, so stay tuned! Let me know if you have any more questions in the meantime.