: How to tie together Facebook Pages and main website I'm anonymising this situation a bit, so I apologise if the scenario seems a bit contrived, but the question is a genuine one I need to

@Deb1703797

There's no written "best practice" guide for integrating Facebook pages with a corporate website, but you can learn a lot from the way established companies do it. Predominantly, they combine 'Like' buttons with links, and I suggest you do that too.

For example, Apple has official Facebook pages for iTunes and the App Store. The App Store page gets no mention that I could find, but the Facebook page is currently featured prominently on the iTunes product page, with a 'Like' button and a link to their Facebook page ('Become a fan...'):



To do this, they're using a lightly customised version of the Facebook Like Box, with the 'show faces', 'show stream', and 'show header' boxes unchecked. You could adopt this for your site too, unless you prefer their other widgets.

If you're going to adopt social media tools at all, it makes sense to do as much as you can to build a following without ruining the usability and readability of your site. As such, there are few reasons not to include both a 'Like' button and a link; you don't have to choose one or the other. Do both.

Creating a canonical URL from the main page that refers to your Facebook page is probably a bad idea as you suggest, because you'll send any search traffic to Facebook instead of your own site. There are times when this might be a good thing -- Sony have been known to redirect the entire minisite for a product to their Facebook page during the launch campaign, for example -- but it tends to be only for time-limited campaigns where the focus is to build a Facebook presence around a single product.

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