Adding the Facebook Like Button

Facebook Like connects your blog to millions of people on Facebook

The Facebook Like button enables your blog readers to opt in to receive your blog updates in their Facebook News Feed. And it's now available for all TypePad blogs.

Connecting your blog to the ever growing Facebook universe ensures your most avid readers are reminded to come back to your blog as soon as there is fresh content.  And that means more visitors! Horray! 

Plus your readers can help you publicize your blog. When they hit the "Like" button their Facebook friends get to learn about your blog, so now they have a chance to let their friends know that they LIKE your site.

Our friends at Facebook know how keen the TypePad Team are on building community and helping our bloggers build their audience so they invited us (Six Apart) to be an official launch partner. Pretty cool.

So what's next?

1) First things first. You have to add it. Super simple. Just go to Settings and Sharing and follow the prompts. Don't forget if you're a Pro user you can move the module around the design of your blog to place it wherever your heart desires. In Design > Content.

2) If you already have a Fan Page on Facebook you might like to ask your Facebook fans to also "Like" your blog. (These lists of fans don't sync up right now.)

3) You might also think about explaining the new Like button to your blog readers and inviting them to "Like" it so they can follow you on Facebook.

That's it! Let us know how it goes

We made a list of these and other great questions, answers, and ideas from our beta users. Read on to find out more.

The arrival of the Facebook Like button has some pretty exciting consequences for brand marketers and media businesses. You can read more about that on the Six Apart blog.

FAQs

• Are users who "Like" my blog the same as the fans of my Facebook page?

If you have already created a Facebook fan page for your blog, users who are fans of that page will not automatically be carried over to additionally "Like" your blog. While the actions are similar, the "Like" concept is essentially an evolution of the Fan Page. It allows Facebook users to "Like" sites they find across the web, send these updates to their networks, and redirect their networks to these sites without stopping at a Facebook page.
 

• How can I see all of the users on Facebook who have "liked" my blog?
  

Once you've added the "Like" button to your blog, as the blog owner you will see an "Admin Page" link directly in the placement. This link is only seen by, and available to, you. Clicking through the link will take you to an Admin page for your blog, showcasing who on Facebook has "Liked" your posts and what post updates they've seen displayed in their news feeds.
 

• How can I get the "Like" button to show at my post footer so that users can "Like" my individual posts?

This is a great idea and we're working on it. Expect to see this feature sometime soon. For those of you on advanced templates, you can test out the per post like button now

• I'm trying to connect my blog to Facebook but the connection continues to spin and returns a "webpage not found" error.

We are looking into this issue but have not been able to track down the root cause yet. We recommend that you switch to Firefox to connect your blog since Internet Explorer users have had more issues with connecting their blogs.

•  Can I customize the Like button?

The widget content is controlled and served by Facebook through an iframe (image) that we've made available to your blog. TypePad does not have control over the styling of the button or the copy and links. In the next release, we'll fix it so that the widget will automatically detect the width of your sidebar and fit appropriately. There are some minimal customization options available through Facebook's Social Plugins  page.