Facebook

Flash Banners in Facebook for Free

My author friend David Athey is doing this film festival thing for his first novel, Danny Gospel. I wanted to give his event a little boost so I put my facebook page making skills into action and created this page.

I wanted to add a little flair (no not that dumb FB application) to the page, and I remembered that when I was creating my NACCAP presentations, Keynote gave me tons of saving options. It turns out that you can turn your Keynote slideshows into flash banners or quicktime movies. Here are a couple of pointers when trying this out:

• 3D transitions in keynote won’t convert over. You’ll have to use the 2D generic ones or just let keynote convert them for you
• You can’t use an FBML or HTML box in facebook for flash or video, but facebook has created a special application for flash on pages. Add it to your page, and then upload your flash presentation along with a preview picture.
• FB flash is limited, meaning that the presentation will not autoplay or loop. To counter this, make your preview image something that encourages clicking and duplicate your presentation in the slide window so that it will seem like it’s looping.
• If you’re not a mac user or don’t have Keynote, you can use PowerPoint to create a video of your slideshow, but no flash. The only way to add video to your facebook page is to upload the video to the facebook video app (Boooo!).

Check out the Danny Gospel Facebook Page to see what I mean. Click on the main picture to see the flash presentation, and click on the video titled banner to see the quicktime version. While you’re at it, go pick up a copy of Danny Gospel!

© 2008 Tim Cox.