It seems like everyone is on Facebook these days.  It has officially spread to the masses when my mom and mother-in-law are regular users.  Creating a Facebook page for your business is a smart and easy way to broadcast news and drum up interest in your business.  And if you have a Joomla site for your business, there are now a couple of cool extensions out there that should help streamline the process of updating your website and your Facebook page.

The allArticleAnnounce extension by Joomtraders is an easy install, and allows you to publish the first 80 characters or so of any article to Facebook and/or Twitter.  Upon installation, a button is added to the Article editing screen in Joomla, which allows you to edit these options.  The update worked smoothly in my experience, and nicely adds the SEF URL of the article to the post.  My hope is that the developers of this extension continue to update it, and add the ability to send more (or all) of the article, along with an image, to Facebook.  A year's subscription for the extension is $19.95.

The same company also has released allInstantFacebook, which allows the user to publish up to 120 characters of an article to Facebook, directly from the editor in Joomla. A subscription for one year runs $29.95.

Another extension, JoomFB by New Nectar, promises to provide a more robust integration with Facebook. It works via a Facebook application, which you have to setup in the current version, but will be setup for you in the next release (currently 1.2 Beta).  In the version I tested, the component allowed me to easily create a tab on my Facebook page that showed my Joomla website. Additionally, I was able to publish selective content from my Joomla site to a tab on my Facebook page. However, what would make this extension shine would be the ability to publish content to the wall of the Facebook page.  The developers promise that a big change is coming in the joomFB component in the next few weeks, so stay tuned, folks.