Blog / Integrating websites with Facebook

8th December

It’s part of our role when working with clients to help advise and educate them on how best to use Social Networks, not only in their websites but in their wider digital strategies. Everyone wants to utilise the power of Facebook and Twitter, however there are various ways and means to achieve the best for your website and business.

Promoting an active community

For the redesign of the Bath Spa Live website, it was all about demonstrating to their website users that there was an active community already following, discussing and involved in their events. And we wanted to encourage new users to get involved and join this discussion.

However we didn’t want to develop a new area on the Bath Spa Live website for comment and discussion, as this would duplicate what was already happening on Facebook. So it made sense to join the two together. 

Integrating with Facebook

There are numerous ways to make use of Facebook elements on your website. And Facebook’s Developer site does a great job at outlining what they are, so I don’t need to go into them all here.

What we did on the Bath Spa Live website was utilise the Facebook Graph API to pull their wall feed and data onto the homepage of their new website. We do a few things with this data to prevent calling the Facebook servers every time a user comes to the Bath Spa Live website, however the end result creates a live stream of all their community activity and presents it to their website users.

So website users get to see forthcoming events and all the community activity, in one place.

Success

Whilst the technical side of this was relatively straight forward, we have achieved a key goal of the new website redesign. Website users now see there’s a whole active community behind Bath Spa Live, discussing and commenting on their shows and events. And we have created a clear and accessible route for them to get involved.

Posted by Stephen

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