One of the things I spoke about in Social Media Marketing for Dummies was the power of syndication within the digital space. Syndication enables small businesses to re-purpose content across multiple channels to engage users in a consistent manner without have to create entirely new content. We use WordPress as our hub for syndicating information out to various channels.

For Pink Cake Box, we have employed this strategy across many of our channels and with the introduction of iFrames for facebook fan pages we took advantage of this on our facebook fan page.

We created a facebook application that pulls content from our wordpress site and repurposes that content in a format that fits within the confines of facebooks design parameters. The page allows users to interact by leveraging our search feature and displays our most recent cakes and most popular cakes.

This enables us to create a dynamic and fresh facebook page that is automatically updated whenever our wordpress site is updated.

This is just the first step and as Jeff states, there are further opportunities to personalize the experience for facebook users. I’m very excited about this new feature and look forward to seeing more innovations in this space.

Our facebook app now has access to over 1200+ cakes and is automatically updated whenever we post new cakes. I’m proud to say that I believe this is the largest library of cakes available via any facebook application.

So I want to talk a little bit about how we integrated the wordpress search function. There are a few ways to do this, and the two options I considered were:

1. Integrate directly to wordpress default search using the ?s parameter
2. Create a custom search query

Ultimately I choose option 2 so I could create a search results template file in my wordpress theme that was separate from our default search results template. The new search results template file (which is pictured below) was customized to fit the look and feel of the facebook application:

So here are the steps I took to integrate wordpress search with my facebook application:

Step 1) Created a new search results template file that took in a GET parameter as a search term. The search results template uses the GET parameter as input into a custom query to search tags and the post content. Finally it returns the results and formats to match the look and feel of the facebook application.

Here’s the section of code that takes the GET Parameter and runs the custom search query:

These results are returned and looped through to produce the search results output. I use the meta data tags embedded in our posts to pull the appropriate cake thumbnail. This query also restricts itself to only searching categories related to cookies, cakes and cupcakes and not other general categories that do not have cake related photos.

Step 2) Once the wordpress template was all setup, I modified our Facebook canvas page to add a search box which posts to the new search results template page:

Here’s a photo of how it looks:

Step 3) The last piece of integration is ensuring the new search results template can interface back with the facebook application once the user has chosen the cake they want to send to their friends. So there is one more post from the search results template back to the facebook application page that handles the next step of allowing the user to choose the friend they want to send the cake too:

Here is the overall workflow for further clarity:

What’s cool about this application is the tight integration with wordpress that enabled me to to expand it to almost our entire portfolio of online cakes. I was able to tie the facebook API with the wordpress API which allowed me to tap into the existing cakes posted in our online cake galleries. The application is setup so that it can pull based on any wordpress tag or category. So anytime a new cake is posted it automatically shows up in the facebook application.

This application illustrates the power and advantage of the structured wordpress environment and its ability to re-purpose content across multiple channels.

Here is a screenshot of the application landing page for sweet 16 cakes:

Here’s a screenshot of what it looks like when a friend receives one of our cakes:

Also, the application helps drive traffic and links to our site since each time you send a cake via facebook it includes a link back to the wordpress blog post about the cake. This approach aligns with advice from Matt Cutts who has always talked about providing “useful services” to help attract high quality links and traffic.