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PEOPLE ARE 'LIKING' THINGS LIKE CRAZY ON FACEBOOK!! In this post learn how to (disclaimer: "possibly") generate MASS exposure to your sites, leveraging the Facebook 'Like' button and the DESIRE for Facebookers to 'like' things.

Perhaps you remember the days (or you may still do it) where you create a page on your site that is suited for the StumbleUpon audience. You know.. something funny, sad, sexy, weird.. whatever. You give it the initial Stumble and then hope the other Stumblers look at it and "thumbs it up" in hopes it eventually goes viral...

Well.. why not do the same thing but with the Facebook audience? I'll tell you how I do it.

For each niche I create a page (or use one that I made for use on StumbleUpon). I make sure the web site navigation is in place and maybe some AdSense or other relevant ad...but I put focus on the actual content. Then I add code to display a Facebook 'Like' button to allow visitors to 'Like' the page so it shows up in their Facebook timeline (wall, profile, etc.)

On this page you can also include meta tags so that you can specify the title of the page (where you can get creative and even include a call to action), the name of the site (where you can also get clever), and a relevant image to associate with the 'like'.

Here's how it shows up on Facebook after someone 'likes' it:

The first part is a link to the actual page you created on your site.. and the second part is a link to the root domain. Facebook figures out the root domain on it's own and uses your meta tag to determine what it's called. If you fail to use a meta tag, the site link doesn't show up. If you don't specify a title meta tag then it uses the title found between the title HTML tags. The image that you specify in the meta tags is used when hovering over the page link on Facebook.

Alter The Title For Testing

At the moment the way it works is.. if you edit the meta tags.. Facebook will eventually update all instances of the 'like' that exist on people's profiles. That way you can track how well your titles are working for getting people to your site. In other words... if not enough people are 'liking' your page after a few days, change up the title/call to action and/or the site name and see if that helps.

Creating A 'Like' Page on WordPress

Often, my niche sites and blogs are created using WordPress. When I create these pages on WordPress, sometimes I don't want them showing up in the navigation menu that gets auto-created for the pages, because the title is usually pretty long. You can simply use the "exclude" WordPress command within the themes to prevent it from showing up.

To add the 'like' button code to posts (in single.php) or pages (page.php) you can first go here: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like then scroll down to the bottom and pick the options that you want. Put in 'xxx' or something for the URL (unless you are just using it in one place on a static site or whatever), then click 'Get Code'. Grab the iframe code and replace 'xxx' with:

<?php echo urlencode(get_permalink($post->ID)); ?>


Then paste where you want it to show up in your theme files. This code will auto-translate the URL to pass to Facebook when someone 'likes' it.

You can also find the optional meta tags on this page. For our purposes I think it's a good idea to use them all (well, not necessarily the image one if you don't want to).

The 3 meta tags have 2 parameters... property and content..

The properties include "og:title" , "og:site_name" and "og:image" (all self explanatory)

I suggest creating the title carefully.. that is what initially makes someone want to 'like' it and possibly check it out. Some people will even 'like' it from within Facebook and not visit the page. That's OK because it exposes the page to all of their friends, etc. But, ultimately we want them to visit the page. Also, it seems people are growing accustom to 'liking' just the actual statement in the title without any knowledge that they can click over to see anything... or really no desire.. I think that's where a call to action in the title can be handy.

Well, that should be it.. best of luck with you viral Facebook campaigns and the use of the proverbial 'like' button. I'm interested to see where this trend goes and what clever things people will be cooking up.

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3. Create Unique MTV-Style Videos
4. RE: WordPress Images – How Do I Show Images In A WordPress Post?
5. Google Landing Page Quality Score Will Soon Have A New Factor – Tips To Make It A Non-Issue

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