Sure, you can have your Facebook fans hunt for a way to contact your business by assuming they will go to your website and hope they find the contact option (if there is one), a phone number (if there is one), you can make them read through the Info tab (did you put a contact email address there?), or hope they will make an educated guess and send an email to support@, webmaster@ or info@.

"Oh, if they really want to get in touch with us, they will find a way." (A true quote from a client)

What happened to convenience? What happened to making it easy for customers, clients and visitors to get in touch with you?

If you had a real brick-and-mortar store, would you board up the front door and instead send your customers on a wild goose chase around the building, to the back alley, up a ramp and still assume they will shop with you?
Yes, we’re open, but we’re not going to tell you how to get to our store.

Just because it’s Facebook doesn’t mean that everything that applies to actual storefronts and *regular* websites suddenly doesn’t matter anymore or that the rules simply don’t apply.

As Facebook becomes more and more of a business tool, businesses slowly realize it is becoming a quasi-necessity to be present on Facebook.
But almost like 15 years ago, when the web first became popular and a website became a must-have — most of them rush in, create a Facebook page because someone told them they had to, and then they don’t care about it anymore.

Sure, Facebook is (still) a new medium (yes, I dare call Facebook a medium here), and there are no real guidelines on how to do it right, there are a couple of things every business should consider when deciding to Go Facebook:

- Branding: Make your Facebook Page look somewhat like your website. At least upload your Company Logo & edit the Info tab. Tell users what they can expect, what business you are in, tell them about the services you provide, your products, etc.
- Interactivity: Facebook has the administrative interface built in. Post updates on your Wall! You do not have to call your web designer to do it. Nobody wants to see a stale Facebook Page (e.g. last update 10 months ago).
- Customization: Default settings are just that. Not changing them is like buying a new house and never furnishing it. Remove unnecessary items from your Page’s navigation, re-order the tabs, add new ones by installing Apps that add value to your Page.

- Must-Haves: As already mentioned above; Facebook Pages do not provide an option to contact the owner or admin directly. Users can only post on your Wall and hope that you are actively monitoring the newsfeed. Give them the opportunity to contact you!
To accomplish this (and to create other Tabs on your Page), you have to use a Facebook App – one like the Contact Form for Facebook by inlineVision.

Their App not only allows you to add a Contact Form to your Facebook Page in 2 simple steps, the Premium Version also allows you to customize and brand the App to your liking — for a one-time-payment of $49 — via a very easy to use Admin Panel (comparable Apps usually come with a subscription fee of around $10/month).

You can upload your Company Logo, customize the colors, add your business address, the phone number, customize the headline and the tagline and specify the recipient of the submitted data. The Premium version also gives you the opportunity to download the submissions in *.csv format so you can import them into your CMS or your mailing list software.

There are no hidden fees and there is no subscription necessary for the service – once your payment has been processed and you have been upgraded, all the Premium Options are immediately available.

$49 is very small price for an App that might prove invaluable for all Facebook Page owners.

Get the Free Version of the Contact Form here.
Upgrade or buy the Premium Version here.

Quick Overview

It lists all your posts (sorted by date), including post title, link to the individual post, facebook Like, Share, Comment, Total & Click Counts and provides a link to your facebook’s “secret Admin Page” (if available).

Prerequisites

WordPress (obvious)
Facebook’s Like button, facebook’s Share button, either manually or via a plugin.
The following HTML tags in your WordPress theme’s header file:

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"
        xmlns:og="http://opengraphprotocol.org/schema/"
        xmlns:fb="http://www.facebook.com/2008/fbml" <?php language_attributes(); ?>>

The following minimum of facebook’s Open Graph tags in your WordPress theme’s header file:

<meta property="fb:admins" content="YOUR_FACEBOOK_USER_ID"/>
<meta property="og:title" content="<?php the_title_attribute( $args ); ?>" />
<meta property="og:type" content="blog" />
<meta property="og:url" content="<?php echo get_permalink($post->ID); ?> "/>
<meta property="og:image" content="LINK_TO_AN_IMAGE_ON_YOUR_SERVER" />

By facebook userID we mean your numerical userID, not your screen name.

Make sure you use the correct facebook user ID, because you cannot change it once people started liking your post you can only append it, but you cannot change it.

Don’t forget to Like your own post/page (when logged into facebook as the same user), only then will facebook create the actual facebook page from your post.

You can tell the page is available because next to your Like button you will see a link to the Admin Page (only of you chose “standard” in the button layout).

As soon as this (Admin) Page is available, a link to its Insight location is available via the plugin, right next to the Like and Share counts, from which you get to the actual page (by clicking on the logo).


<sarcasm>Besides the fact that facebook obviously cannot spell “administrator”, this page is a fully functional facebook page. And the people who clicked the Like button are still called Fans </sarcasm off>

Installation

Download the plugin
Extract the files into the fb-socialstats directory
Upload the directory into your WordPress /wp-content/plugins/ directory
Activate the Plugin in your WordPress Plugins menu
Go to FB Social Stats in your Dashboard.

Configuration

We included a style sheet to make the output pretty. It automatically gets loaded when the plugin is called. Feel free to edit it any way you like it.

Known Issues

Occasional long loading times due to facebook API connectivity issues.

Please let us know your comments – we appreciate your feedback!

But eventually we gave in, after doing our research we integrated both buttons into our blog and waited. We waited to see if somebody was actually using the buttons, and what was going to happen when someone did.

While Sharing and Liking are two different concepts, we almost immediately noticed something very odd:

We like this

Of course we clicked our own Like button. Twice. And as expected the number of people who like this increased accordingly to Two people like this.
The Share counter didn’t show any change (expected: as you might know by now you need 3 Share actions for the counter to show). Or so we thought.

We didn’t share this

After the third click on the Like button (by a trusted friend) we found that 3 people like this (as expected), but after a page reload something else had happened as well: the Share counter notified us that our article had been shared 3 times.

Really? Within this short time 3 people had already thought our article was worth sharing 3 times? How come?

Ask the API

We needed to know for sure so we went ahead and queried the facebook API for the URL in question, and this is what we found:

0
3
0
3
0

Does this mean the Share counter is wrong? Does it count the wrong entry (like_count) instead of share_count?

So we shared the article, once by posting it to a facebook user’s profile, and once by sending it as a message and reloaded the page again.

Now the Like counter said: 5 people like this and the Share counter told us the article had been shared 5 times.

We queried the API again and found this:

2
3
0
5
0

To make sure we liked and shared different URLs as well, and after every Like, Unlike and Share action we ran another query to monitor the results.

Temporary conclusion

By now we feel it’s safe to say that the count you see next to the Like button and the count above (or next to) the Share button is the combined count of at least like_count and share_count. At this point we are unable to say if comments add to the displayed count as well (but it might be a fair assumption since total_count is being shown after comment_count).

But there still are 2 different options to express your appreciation for an (external) page: You can *share* it by clicking the *share* button or you can *like* it.

What’s the difference?

To *Like* an article, a page, or any kind of content on the web, all you have to do is click the *Like* button, and your profile will be updated with this information.

Similar to *liking* your friend’s status, link, video or anything else you can post/put on facebook. If there is a *Like* button, that is.

The *Like* button will turn dark blue, your *like* is added to the counter (if displayed), and (most likely) your facebook profile picture will show. Another click on the dark blue *Like* button let’s you "unlike" the item again, your *like* gets subtracted from the counter and your picture gets removed.

The *Share* button is a convenient way to take an article, a video, a picture, or anything else that can be accessed via a URL and post a link to that content on your wall.
It eliminates the steps of copying the URL, opening your facebook page and pasting the URL into the box labeled "What’s on your mind?".

It works in the exact same way as adding a post that contains a link to your wall, you can add a comment to it, select a thumbnail or send it as a message.

The shared URL then looks like any post on your wall that contains a link:

Interesting fact:
The *Share* counter needs a minimum of 3 *shares* until the counter is being displayed. *likes* show up immediately, even if only 1 person *likes* it.

The reason why we decided to display both of them is simple:
You can *like* something but don’t necessarily want to *share* it: maybe because *liking* is quick – click, done.
You can still *share* the article after *liking* it. And vice versa.
Too bad we all cannot *Unlike* the *Like* button.

There is already a variety of Wordpress plugins available for both buttons, and both facebook’s *like* documentation as well as facebook’s *share* wiki have wizards that let you create the button code.

We decided to plug the code into a nice little function and to call it manually, allowing for greater flexibility in choosing when, where and how to display the buttons:

You can see that at the top of the postings we don’t display the *Like* counter or the profile picture; simply because we wanted to keep the button lineup to the right of the article.

At the bottom of the posting however we do show the full *Like* button together with the counter and the profile picture.

Links:

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like
http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Connect/Using_Facebook_Share
http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Facebook_Share
http://www.facebook.com/facebook-widgets/share.php