Joe Reifer

My friend Jay Watson did a presentation at Brooks last week. He also teaches part-time at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, where he hooked me up with a Photoshop teaching gig for a semester last year. Being around the 20-something set can be very educational. They are fired up. Turns out that a lot of the kids don’t read blogs — much of their online time is spent on MySpace, Facebook, and IM. So if blogs are to share our photography with a community of photographers, how do we help the kids? How about broadcasting on one of the primary channels they listen to — Facebook.

OK, you say. I’m twice the age of people on Facebook. I enjoy blogging, but social networking is not for me. Well, you might be surprised which folks in the larger photography community are on Facebook. And it’s easy to keep your Facebook page fresh by automatically pulling in your blog posts as Notes. Add me as a friend if you want:

First things first — if have a blog, Feedburner is a great way to make it easy for people to subscribe, and for you to figure out who your readers are. It’s free, and owned by a reliable company you may have heard of called Google. Feedburner has some easy to use instructions for promoting your feed if you use Blogger, or on the self-hosted version of WordPress (which is how I roll).

Allright. You’ve got a Feedburner feed and a Facebook account. You can import one blog onto your Facebook page, and the posts will be automatically imported and shared with your contacts.

But before you import your blog, you may want to have a look at the Facebook Terms of Use. Let me sum it up for you in two words: Rights Grab. Here’s the important part:

By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

Even if you think the risk is small that Facebook would jack the photos imported from your blog to use for their own devious purposes, why take the chance? Well, you can have your cake and eat it too. Here’s how to import a text-only blog excerpt to your Facebook page:

1. Login to your Feedburner account. We’re going to make a new feed specifically for Facebook. When you’re done, your Feedburner page will look something like this:

OK, you’ll note that my subscribers list has been slightly inflated to impress you.

2. Copy and paste your RSS address into the Burn a feed right this instant box. If you’re using WordPress, your RSS address will look something like this: http://www.joereifer.com/words/?feed=rss2

3. Add a useful title for your Facebook-specific feed, like Joe Reifer (Facebook), and an address to match: http://feeds.feedburner.com/joereifer_facebook

4. Activate your new feed, click on the Optimize tab, and then rock these settings for Facebook:

a. Content Type: text/xml. This excludes the precious images that are on your blog from being imported into Facebook:

b. Summary Burner: The number of characters that will appear. Just a short amount of text works well here.

That’s it. You now have a Feedburner feed that is text only and shows the first 200 characters of your blog posts. Import this new feed into Facebook, and every time you blog an excerpt will be posted for your friends that looks like this:

When someone clicks through on the blog post, they get a page that allows them to link directly to your blog, or to email your post to someone who might enjoy it. That page looks like this:

Alternately, there is a plugin for bloggers that use a hosted version of WordPress called Wordbook. I haven’t tried it, but Jay let me know it works great. Facebook seems to change their design often enough that I’d worry about a plugin breaking. I also like the statistics provided by the Feedburner option outlined above.

Well, I hope a few photography bloggers found these Feedburner to Facebook instructions to be useful. Let me know if you’ve got any other tips or techniques for sharing content — You know, for kids!