Recently I did a little research for a client and I thought that I would share with you what I discovered. My client wanted to know how visitors to his site could Share or Like his Flash swfs on Facebook. We see the Like and Share buttons for Facebook just about everywhere we go on the web. Why not use them to market your Flash skills? There are three options.

The first is to have your visitor use a Facebook Like button to post a link back to your website on their Facebook pages. There is nothing fancy here. On Facebook there will be just a text link. To use this option, you just need to create the Like button on your site. Facebook has a nice wizard that will generate Like buttons for you. As you can see, you will need to supply the url to your swf.

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like

The second option is to use a Share button. The Share button works much like the Like button but has been around longer. What's nice about the Share button is that it will place a thumbnail image of your Flash swf along with the link back to your site. The Facebook system doesn't generate this thumbnail for you. You will need to create one from a screenshot of your Flash animation or by exporting an image from Flash (File – Export – Export Image). To use this option, you need to add the Share button to your web page along with a few meta tags in the header section of the page. These meta tags pass along information to Facebook such as the url for the thumbnail image, title of your swf and so on.

http://developers.facebook.com/docs/share

The third option will create the most marketing impact. We will use the Share button and meta tags again but also have your swf play inline on Facebook. Facebook will display a link back to the swf on your website and the thumbnail will act as a link to open the swf to play inside the Facebook page. You need to get whitelisted to do this embedding.

http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=video_embed_whitelist
http://www.facebook.com/help/contact.php?show_form=video_embed_whitelist#!/terms.php

Update: The Facebook Share button is no longer available.