Embedding Facebook into blogs

I wrote a while ago about our B2B Marketing strategy on Facebook, which was to connect on a more relaxed, social level with our customer community, many of whom are also friends. This has worked very well, and we do our best to share the latest event pictures and videos on that site.

The interesting challenge, however, is how to make sure everyone is aware of it as a venue. This is a challenge that a number of marketers I've chatted with have also shared.



There's a simple trick, which I've recently enabled on Eloqua Artisan (if you're reading this in a reader, you'll have to come to the blog itself to see it in action), which is to embed a Facebook gadget into your blog sidebar so that anyone who reads your posts will become aware of your Facebook presence, and can join you there.

It was a simple technique, so I thought it worth sharing here, as it can be of value to any marketer focused on incorporating social media within an overall marketing messaging approach. I personally use Blogger as a platform, so the instructions will be specific to that, but I suspect they are easily transferable to other platforms.

First, add an HTML widget to the sidebar of your main blog layout. Give it an appropriate title, and then add the Facebook embed code to that widget. (content for the embed code is available at this link, but as it's javascript, you won't see anything in a browser).

There are 3 things you may want to change. First, one that you must change, is the Facebook profile ID (highlighted in the image). Change this to your own Facebook fan page profile, which you can find in the URL for your fan page when you view it on Facebook.

You can also change the "width" parameter to set the size of the embedded widget, and the "connections" parameter to change the number of fans that are shown. With that completed, save it, and you are live with an embedded Facebook fan page in your blog, which will help you greatly with awareness of the page.

Tracking of your own Social Media Properties

Tracking social media is key to understanding its effectiveness as part of your overall marketing strategy.

Part one of understanding social media's effectiveness is to understand what is driving traffic to your online properties. Tracking inbound referrals gives us a great sense of the flows of inbound web traffic and whether Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Delicious, or LinkedIn are driving traffic. It also gives us a great sense, at an individual level of what brought each person to our online properties.

However, part two of understanding social media's effectiveness is understanding how effective your own social media properties are. Tracking of these online properties is a very valuable extension to your ability to understand the digital body language of your prospects across all of your web presence. With many social media sites, however, such as blogs, you often do not have the ability to build a sub directory system to place the scripts into.

In order to get around this, from the standard installation of web scripts, it is possible to rework the tracking scripts to look at a static URL for the rest of the scripts. The scripts will look like they do in the image above, where http://www.yourmainsite.com/ is a static URL that you put the script files on.

With that in place, you then need to put the links to those tracking scripts on your blog. Each blog platform is slightly different, but generally they all allow adding HTML and scripts inline. I use blogger, and the scripts are easily placed inline just before the close of the BODY tag.

I look forward to hearing your comments on how this has worked for you.

Analyzing a Blog or a Subsidiary Website

As part of running this blog, I wanted to be able to separate my traffic on this area of the site from the main Eloqua.com web traffic. Separating it lets me dashboard it, build rules specific to the site and better understand what is happening.



The first step in working with a blog or a subsidiary website (either for a specific campaign, for a product, or for a subsidiary company) is to define a Sub Site. This is a domain name, or a few domain names, that define the Sub Site to be analyzed. It is still part of the main web analytics, but can also be analyzed as a stand alone entity.



In Eloqua, in the Web Integration tab under Web Profiling, create a new Sub Site, and add in the domain you want to track separately. I'm creating a Sub Site for the Digital Body Language blog, and another for the Eloqua Artisan blog, so I'll create a new Sub Site for each.



That is all you need to do to create a Sub Site. Now it can be analyzed, and added to a dashboard. In the Report Console, go to the Website Overview section and you'll see a list of reports that relate to analyzing your Sub Site.



For each report that you want to use, click the Add to a Dashboard menu item to add it to your dashboard. This will give you a configuration screen where you can configure the options for how this report is shown on your dashboard. I usually would use a relative time range of last 14 or 28 days to give a recent history of the performance of the Sub Site.





Select the dashboard you want to add the report to (I'm assuming you've created a personal dashboard earlier - if not you'll want to do that). The dashboard will be available from your Eloqua Today page, and can be shared with your colleagues if appropriate.



If you're using this technique to track traffic on a blog, you'll probably notice that I didn't cover adding the tracking scripts to the blog itself. Not hard to do on any of the standard blogging platforms, but I'll cover that in a separate post.