Three ways to integrate Facebook into your blog

Facebook is by far the largest and most powerful social network on the internet today hosting "more than 400 million active users" according to statistics released by Facebook. But what bloggers should find even more interesting is that those 400 million users spend a combined total of "more than 500 billion minutes on Facebook," according to the statistics.

Today, while Twitter tried to sink its "fail whale" Mashable asked readers an important questions, "Is Facebook Getting Bigger than Google?" The story was related to a report by Hitwise's which said internet users in the UK are visiting Facebook.com more than Google.com for the first time in internet history.

On that note, we've created a list of ways to integrate Facebook into your blog. In doing so, bloggers are likely to increase readership and even increase the likelihood of reader interaction.

Build a Facebook Fan Page

So you want to get the word out about your blog. The important thing to remember is that even though you may not have many readers coming to your site on a daily basis, there are millions of potential readers visiting Facebook everyday.

You could just post your stories to your personal Facebook wall and hope that readers take interest, click your link and see what's on your blog; however, in doing so you aren't really building a community around the site.

When you create a Facebook Fan Page, you are asking users to show support for your blog and to subscribe to what you post. But you can take it a step further.

When you post your latest blog post to your Facebook Wall, ask questions and encourage readers to interact with one another. Eventually, readers will become more familiar with your blog and the interaction on your blog will improve as well and when it does, be sure to tell your fans by pointing out interesting comments and questions submitted by their fellow readers.

Create a Facebook "Like Box" (Fan Box)

Now that you have a fan page, show it off on your blog page. Create a Like Box at Facebook's Developer page and embed the widget into your site. The Like Box advertises your fan page to readers who may not know that you are on Facebook and, with specifications, links to the latest post on your page. You can also add a Like button to the box so that users can like your fan page directly from your blog.

"Like" Button

The "Like" button is one of the easiest ways for readers to share your blog content to Facebook. When a reader clicks the Like button on a blog post, that post is then immediately shared to the reader's Facebook Wall and network (Statistic: The average Facebook user has 130 friends.) The Like button can be added to almost any kind of website, or blog such as Blogger, Wordpress and Tumblr. It's also really easy to make a Like button for individual Web addresses.