Oct 20 2011

Using the New Facebook iFrame Feature Posted 209 days ago ago by John Clark     0 Comments

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Transforming your business Facebook page into a truly rich experience for your visitors can lead to a lot more interaction between you and your customers. Over half a year ago Facebook announced they were doing away with the old FMBL coding language. Now you can set in your own mini website right inside Facebook. 

For a view of how it looks on our page you can click on the image or here. There are a lot of good reasons to use this type of set up for your Facebook Business Page and here are a few off the top. (BTW: This is not written for "programmers" or web developers. It's written for business owners with few or no web coding skills so I'm not getting real technical in language about things. OK?)

Alright, here is one term most don't understand: iFrame. In short, you can insert into your Facebook page content from second website in a framed area, which we call and iFrame in code language.

It's basically a page inset into another page. In this case we inserted the page you see at wowfbnow.com into the Facebook page in a way that makes it look like it belongs there, seamless. In this case we inserted a whole mini-website. You can click on the buttons and drill into the site options.

1. Looks Great, Not Boring: You can make the page look just the way you want it, as long as it's 520px wide. You can insert a great looking graphical interface creating your own page on a separate website. You can be as creative as you want to be and make changes on the website where it's based very easily.

2. Tracking Traffic: All the same code from Google Analytics to Statcounter can be inserted into your pages so you can actually track traffic into your site. How many people have actually looked at your Facebook page? Wouldn't you like to know that to measure the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns?

3. Track Conversions from Facebook: If you are running Facebook ad campaigns, you tend to get more conversions when you land people on a page within Facebook instead of your website. It will also increase your "Like" count. Then you can capture them if you have a whole mini site within Facebook. You can see all your traffic in Google Analytics, then see how many likes and contacts come through. This is can huge for many.

4. Using Dynamic Programming Languages: Any language your developer can build a website with can be inserted in the frame. We use ASPX, you can also use PHP or CFM. If you don't know what those are, don't worry, your programmer does and it is liberating.

5. Ecommerce Enablement: Selling from your store online? Now you can have specially designed pages and insert your shopping cart right inside your Facebook page. Your whole inventory and ordering is right there on your landing page inside Facebook. 

There are a couple of things that have to be done to get this all working properly. While these are beyond the pale of most users, your web developer should be able to accomplish these things for you.

1. SSL Certificate: Beginning this October 1st Facebook requires that any pages inserted come from a site with an SSL Certificate. This secure socket license means that the site owner has been verified and actually belongs to the person that says it says it belongs to. This is in the https designation in the address bar. So your website has to have this certificate. All of Facebook is now SSL and all the content on the pages is required to be the same. Prevents a lot of fakery and scams. 

2. 520px Wide: Your normal website won't fit into this. The average site today is about 1000px wide. This has to be a specially coded page with a narrow width. A cut down version of your average site. 

We offer two ways of creating these pages. We can create a pre-certified SSL site within our wowfbnow.com site and customize it for you to insert into Facebook. Alternately, we can help you certify your own site and work with you to code the pages for insertion. 

Either way we are glad to help. You can be done with just having boring wall posts on your main page - now you can have a virtual site embedded. Take advantage of it.





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