RSS-Connect

Integrating your site's RSS feed with Facebook can often be clunky, and Facebook's built-in features aren't well suited for integrating feeds from a newspaper site. Several add-ins are out there, but the best and most versatile out there is RSS-Connect.

Some use Facebook's Notes feature to accomplish this same thing. There are a few things about notes that make it an infrerior solution for news organizations, though.

When Notes imports an item from your RSS feed it hosts your content (story) on Facebook. An application like RSS-Connect simply places a link to the content. That means people go to your site to see the content and generate page views for you, not Facebook. It also means that all comments are hosted on your site, not on Facebook, which keeps the dialoge in one place that you control.

Features

There are many applications out there similar to RSS-Connect, but here are a few reasons that RSS-Connect is ideal for news use:

1. It will integrate with fan pages and profile pages.
2. The application can present your feed data in several forms — as a box on your Wall page, as a box on your Boxes page or as a tab of its own.
3. RSS-Connect will display multiple feeds (up to five). That means if you have seperate feeds (news, sports, blogs, comments, etc.) you can show them seperately instead of having to combine them into one feed as required by other apps.
4. It allows you to display the feeds in several ways. For example, you can have it only show the summary for the first story and just headlines for the others.

Installing

If you have a support question, the application's discussion boards are active and the appliation's developer answers users' questions regularly. You can also contact the developers directrly.

There's some useful information on the application's administration page about how to set up your feeds. You'll have to install it to view that page, though.

More to come

Ideally, a good RSS application for Facebook will update your fans regularly every time you post new content, which will lead them to your site to interact. RSS-Connect doesn't do that yet, but the developer has said that feature is coming soon.