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This week my tip is pretty specific to those people who have or are building Facebook fanpages.

If you are serious about creating a presence for yourself in social media though I think it is an absolute MUST.

As a matter of fact, here are my top 3 reasons for having a Facebook fanpage.

But assuming you’ve created one and you are attempting to customize it as I suggested… you will want to add video… and I’m going to show you exactly how.

First you will need to add the Static FBML Application to your fanpage.

Once you have created a page using the FBML Application you will need the following code to add a YouTube video:

<fb:swf
swfbgcolor="000000" imgstyle="border-width:3px; border-color:white;"
swfsrc='http://www.youtube.com/v/xxxxxxxxxx'
imgsrc='http://img.youtube.com/vi/xxxxxxxxxx/2.jpg' width='340' height='270' />

You will replace the ‘xxxxxxxxxx’ in the swfsrc with your Youtube video ID which is the string of characters in your video URL after ‘v=’.

For example, if this is your Youtube video URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTJejhMidDY

You would replace ‘xxxxxxxxxx’ with ‘WTJejhMidDY’.

The imgsrc is the preview image. You can replace the ‘xxxxxxxxxx’ in this part of the code with your Youtube video ID (‘WTJejhMidDY’) as well.

The only problem is that because of size differences in the preview picture between Youtube and Static FBML the quality is not going to be very good (trust me I know from experience).

An easy way to make any picture you want to be the preview is to upload it to Photobucket. Once you have uploaded it, the picture will have it’s own URL. You will replace the Youtube URL in the imgsrc with the picture’s URL.

So your final code might look something like this:

<fb:swf
swfbgcolor=”000000″ imgstyle=”border-width:3px; border-color:white;”
swfsrc=’http://www.youtube.com/v/Z6V2WSyiC_M’
imgsrc=’http://i606.photobucket.com/albums/tt148/lifeofpurposeandpassion/amandamarie.jpg’ width=’445′ height=’334′/>

You can always play around with the border color, width and height to make your video look exactly the way you want.

LAST sidenote – If you follow these directions you will have a lovely picture on your Fanpage FBML page but your fans have to know that they are supposed to CLICK on the picture to see your video.

To do this you could either put text above telling them to click on it… OR you could draw a “Play” button on your picture like I did. I did it about the simplest way possible. If you have the technology to do fancy image editing, go for it but I got the job done using the good old Paint program. Just open your picture in Paint, draw a “Play” button, and then resave it to your computer. Upload the picture with the play button on it to Photobucket and you’re in business.

I hope this post has been helpful, and if you have any further questions feel free to leave me a comment below and I will try my best to help you answer it.

Head over to http://www.facebook.com/JoinAmandaMarie to see what the finished product will look like.

I’m looking forward to seeing some videos floating around on those fanpages! It’s about time to put Facebook to work for you.

To Your Ultimate Success,

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