How to Save Discussions on Your Facebook Page

[tweetmeme]Here’s some good news for Facebook page admins who are unhappy with the social networking site’s plan to end support of the Discussion tab for pages on October 31.

An Irish startup company named Pixode has developed a free app called Forum for Pages that adds a discussion tab to your page, and allows you to import and save your existing discussions to that tab.

New Forum Improves on Current Discussion Tab

This new app improves on the current discussion tab in a couple of key ways:

Currently, when a user chooses to read a Facebook discussion, they are taken off the wall to a separate page:

But when someone clicks the new Forum tab, the discussions are displayed right on the wall, as you can see below:

The second benefit to the new Forum app is the fact that that the page admin can change the order of the discussion topics by selecting the box marked “Sticky Topic.”

Admins can also lock the topic so no one can comment on it, as well as edit the topic’s title or delete the topic altogether.

Adding Forum for Pages to your Page

To add the app to your page, click on this link: https://apps.facebook.com/forumforpages/ to go to the app, and then click the “add to page” link. A window will open up with the page(s) you are an admin for. Click on “add to page” for the appropriate page and then go to that page. Look for the “forum” tab. Click on it, and then choose to import your existing discussions or start a new topic.

Once you click the “Import existing discussions” link, you’ll get a message saying the discussions are being imported. For best results, leave the tab and do something else on a Facebook for about 5-10 minutes. After that amount of time has passed, you should be able to click on the forum tab again and see your discussion topics.

If you have any problems, let the folks at Pixode know by posting on their wall, or comment below and I’ll get the word to them.