Social Media is really something we all need to embrace, even though there are some groups I work with that do not want to have anything to do with it. Using social media such as Twitter, Facebook and Linked in is very important, particularly in the 3rd sector. It is essentially free marketing if used carefully.

Some groups, for example those with employees or volunteers in their 20’s and 30’s tend to be more proactive driving facebook than their website. Here is a plugin you can add which puts your Facebook stream on your home page.

It is quite simple to add into your site. You need to know the Facebook address for your page to get it to work.

To add the plugin, log into your site and go to the Plugins option and then choose new and search for Custom Facebook Feed by Smash Balloon. Install it, activate it and then go to settings. Enter the URL for your facebook page. Then add the shortcode to the bottom of the home page. You may get an error back, follow the instructions to resolve the error. It is probably something to do with the name or numerical reference to your page.

I did a further refinement and switched the editor to TEXT mode and added a border around the feed to ensure it looked separate from the other content. The code is below (type it in, don’t copy it in case your text editor picks up some formatting from this page).

<div style=”border: 2px solid #fe5a01; padding: 10px; border-radius: 15px;”>
[custom-facebook-feed]
</div>

In the above case it places an orange border around the facebook feed with rounded corners to the boundary. To change the colour replace the #fe5a01 value with the hexadecimal representation of the rgb colour you want to use.

Need help? Contact me.

Precautions

Do however note that depending on how your facebook page is set up there may be things added to your facebook page that are visible that you do not know about. Hopefully you moderate everything before it appears. If you don’t I would not recommend adding this plugin to your site because anything embarrassing on Facebook is automatically also on your site. … and possibly seen by a different audience. So now even more people would be aware of it!