King’s Facebook

The skinny

A pretty sweet suite of Facebook page apps for King's College London - bringing a bit more glamour and brand presence to the world of Facebook profile customisation, and making the most of social data APIs to minimise the need for manual updating.

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King's College London Facebook page apps

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The not-so-skinny

Project overview

Having decided it was time to add a few new features to the King's Facebook profile, we began looking at what was possible with page apps. We found that most of the pre-made app plugins were generic and bland, so we decided to develop our own suite of four apps; 'Our campuses' - an interactive Google Maps-powered overview of King's central London campuses, 'YouTube' - the latest and most popular videos uploaded by King's, 'Twitter' - a feed of, and profiles from, King's main corporate Twitter accounts and 'Useful links' - directing back to the King's website.

Responsibilities

I led the project from within the Marketing Department at King's, collaborating with colleagues in the External Relations Directorate on the content and structure of each app. From there I was solely responsible for the design, build and integration of the apps in to King's Facebook profile.

Technical deets

The 'Our campuses' app uses the Google Maps JavaScript API to plot custom markers and show relevant content depending on the active map markers. Each Campus has a photo slideshow powered by Basic jQuery Slider plugin. The 'YouTube' app uses the YouTube API to make two data calls - one for the most recent videos, and one for the most viewed. The 'Twitter' app uses jQuery Tweet! to display the Tweet feed and the Twitter API to display the latest profile stats for each account. All of the apps use the JavaScript Facebook SDK to dynamically interact with Facebook from within each application. All page apps are built on the HTML5 boilerplate and are optimised for performance using ImageOptim and H5BP Ant build script.

Outcome

Feedback for the pages apps has been very positive, and in the three weeks following launching the apps, likes and 'total reach' have increased steadily at around 5% per week.

Neil
Carpenter

Design & front-end development