Randall Helms dot COM

One of the hot topics at the moment is social video, the use of video as a means of connecting with audiences socially. Video is a wonderfully effective tool and, because every now and then people ask me how to embed video on a Facebook Page,  I thought that it might be useful to the wider community to write a brief post explaining how to do it.

It’s really not that hard to do, so there’s no reason to be scared.

The first step you need to do is add Static FBML (Facebook Markup Language) to your page, which can be done here by clicking on ‘Add to My Page’ on the left (below the image), where you will have the option of adding it to whichever of Facebook Pages to which you have administrative rights.

Having done that, go to your page and then go to Edit Page, and then click on Apps and you will see FBML in there. Click on ‘Go to Application’ (you might need to enable it first), and from there you can give it a title and add your content, using HTML and CSS. In terms of the video itself, you need to use the following FBML code:

<fb:swf
swfbgcolor=”000000″ imgstyle=”border-width:3px; border-color:white;”
swfsrc=’http://www.youtube.com/v/YouTubeURL‘
imgsrc=’http://img.youtube.com/vi/YouTubeURL/2.jpg’ width=’340′ height=’270′ />

You want an example of how this would look?

Easy enough! If you wanted to embed a YouTube video of Goldie’s drum n’ bass classic “Inner City Life” (and wanting to do so would show that you are someone of great taste and distinction!), the FBML code would look like the following:

<fb:swf
swfbgcolor=”000000″ imgstyle=”border-width:3px; border-color:white;”
swfsrc=’http://www.youtube.com/v/x8u7MNG-ug8′
imgsrc=’http://img.youtube.com/vi/x8u7MNG-ug8/2.jpg’ width=’340′ height=’270′ />

Simple stuff! If you want to see this in action, check out the Video of the Week tab on the Facebook Page for my dj alter-ego, Pearsall.

Let me know in the comments if you have any questions.