It seems like I get two requests a week from one of my Facebook friends asking me to become a fan of their business or something they’re promoting. And that’s part of Facebook’s charm – forming groups and sharing information from friend to friend. But this got me thinking about how to take the group that’s formed as part of a Facebook Fan Page and port it over to your email list. Forming a Facebook Fan community is great, but I think there should be a way to allow folks who have joined you there to be a part of your communications outside of Facebook. And it turns out there is a way to add a newsletter opt-in page to your Facebook fan page. The Return on Subscriber blog has walked through step by step how to add this feature. Here’s a link to that post.
Of course, to do this, you’ll need to have a Fan page and the HTML opt-in form code from your ESP. Here’s the static FBML application that’s mentioned in the blog. You’re really just adding this to your Fan page and then adding the HTML sign-up form as you would on any other web page.
Be sure to check out the Return on Subscriber blog, which even includes screenshots with its instructions!
A neat example + code for embedding an “Ajax form” on your facebook fan page can be found at the webwhispers fan page on facebook http://www.facebook.com/webwhispers
It will be under the drop down and will be called “Ajax form”