Facebook has added a new action, called “action links”, to their pages; these go along with the existing actions such as “Like” and “Comment”.

But, unlike the other actions, these put you in control of what happens and is of real benefit to any online business, profit or non-profit.

These action links will let visitors to your Facebook pages interact with the page in any number of ways which you can define, either with built-in actions or custom actions you create and one great feature is the links will show up in Timelines, News Feeds, and Tickers.

Let’s what it means to you and how it works…

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What it Means to You

The short answer is more traffic and more interactions with your page and your apps.

Let me show you an example right from Facebook.

Say you’ve story on your page about a great pizza recipe from your site. When you add an action link you might see something like this (note the “Save the Recipe” action link):

Example of a Facebook Action Link

When they click the “Save” action link you can get “so something” for example get one of your apps installed and also update the story; it might look something like this:

Example of a Facebook Action Result

Even in that simple case you benefit by getting the app installed and by getting the action result on the person’s timeline.

How It Works

Using the above example, when somebody sees the pizza recipe and clicks on the action link “Save the Recipe”, Facebook will see if they have your app installed and if not pop up that window requesting approval of your app; if it is installed then Facebook will go to the URL specified in your app dashboard.

This should do one of 2 things: (1) publish a new “it was saved” story (like in the second picture above) or (2) if you’re leaving Facebook they will pop up a box asking if that’s okay; note, if you don’t do #1, every time they go to the page they still see the action link (not the phrase letting them know they’ve already taken the action).

Here’s what the app dashboard screen to do this looks like.

Facebook App Dashboard Screen

As you can see, this isn’t something the average person can easily do like highlighting a post but it is something that you app developer can do and you can expect to start seeing it in apps and app creators very soon.

While this wasn’t a step-by-step look at how to implement Facebook action links you should now have a better understanding of what they are and how you can use them in your Facebook Apps.

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