Knowledge Base/Community Forums/Community Questions & Answers
Answered
Facebook connect
Brad Cook
asked this on January 30, 2011 21:04
Hi,
Has anyone found a way of connecting their church insight website and facebook using the facebook connect api? Any advice as to whether this is possible would be appreciated!
Thanks,
Brad
Comments
Standard Facebook widgets can be added to pages by clicking the "Source" button in an article and pasting the supplied code directly into the source window.
See: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins
More sophisticated integration can be achieved with javascript and the Graph API, however this requires programming knowledge.
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/javascript/
There is no way, currently, to unify the logins of the two systems so that being logged into Facebook ensures that you are logged into your Insight site.
this is a shame as facebook seems to be what mist users are using, so consequently our insight website is dying
What is the endis strategy to leverage facebook rather than have all your customers suffer by losing traffic due to its success?
Hi Tim. You're right to identify how much Facebook has grown in influence recently.
It's helpful too to understand how Insight and Facebook are positioned differently - Insight's great at communicating via the web as a content management system (CMS) as well as providing a powerful charity supporter or church member management system (ChMS).
Facebook, on the other hand, is a social network (SN) - something Insight's never claimed to be - and Facebook, not surprisingly does this extremely well. However, Facebook is not a CMS or ChMS, despite there being some basic functionality Pages & Groups.
Most organisations need all three elements (CMS, ChMS, SN) to function and communicate effectively in the 21st century.
See this blog post I write recently for more information on this:
http://blog.churchinsight.com/Articles/269758/Riding_the_Web.aspx
We advise developing strong links between your web content and Facebook Pages via Like panels, using Insight's Social Media component or other Facebook developer code elements mentioned above to allow people to recommend content to others on their walls as well as you regularly and systematically posting details of new website content and events to your organisation's Facebook Page, linking back to the website for further details in each instance. We'd also recommend doing the same for Twitter if your organisation uses that.
Thus you'll have content featured on both platforms (Insight and Facebook) and strong links between them, all of which will help to increase traffic to each platform (plus Google likes links in from other websites, so this will all help your website's page ranking).
We're also currently planning a online training webinar on just this kind of stuff which should be available early in 2012 and will contact all Insight adminstrators when there's more information available.
Alistair Birch, Director of Customer Experience, Endis
Hi guys, thought you might be interested in this blog article I've just written about Harnessing the Power of Facebook and helping Insight and Facebook connect together.
http://blog.churchinsight.com/Articles/288405/Harnessing_the_power....
While it's not possible to automatically post events to Facebook, we've now worked out a way to auto-post articles via a certain Facebook RSS component. Hope you find it helpful. If you're needing more of a step-by-step how to, we'll be running some specific training re this kind of stuff in the Spring.