If you read my other blog, you already know that the Bozeman Daily Chronicle is deep into a competition with its sister papers in the Pioneer Newspapers chain. The goal: gain as many fans on Facebook as possible by the middle of April.
In the spirit of that contest, we have decided to give away an iPad 2 to one of our fans on Facebook.
All the details are available on our Facebook fan page. You have to become a fan in order to enter the contest, but that’s not really such a hardship, is it?
More importantly, this contest has forced us to innovate on Facebook. We got by for more than a year on simply posting links to stories and the occasional extra photo and video. People seemed to like it — about 2,000 people anyhow.
But that was no reason to keep things the same. Facebook is a pretty robust platform for developing customapplications, and we have decided to try it out. Â So, in addition to our regular Facebook content, you will soon see:
- Obituary listings pulled straight from the company that hosts them for us (already live on the page)
- TV listings (already live on the page)
- Contests and giveaways (such as the aforementioned iPad giveaway)
- Content directly from our website
The last one is the one I’m particularly excited about. We developed a new template for our website that, when applied to pages we create in our CMS, allows us to easily embed them onto Facebook as iframes. That means that, soon, you’ll be able to get things like headlines and even live updates of MSU games right on Facebook.
I think it’s pretty cool, and I hope you do too.
Oh, I should probably mention something else we’re working on that you’ll be seeing soon: Android and iPhone apps. Stay tuned for details on that topic.