If  you maintain a Facebook page for your band, Facebook provides an application called the Music Player that you can use to upload songs to your band’s page.

When you upload a new song it is automatically published into the news feed of all your fans. You don’t have to send out fan updates to publicize new songs. Publishing into your fan’s news feed is currently the best way to get the attention of Facebook users.

Here are the steps to add Music Player to your Facebook band page :

Login to Facebook. Make sure you are the page admin for the page you are editing.

Ads and Pages

Click on “Ads and Pages” on the left menu.

Update: If you don’t see the “Ads and Pages” link on the left menu simply go to this link to edit pages http://www.facebook.com/pages/manage.

Edit Pages

Click on “Edit Page” link at the bottom of the page you want to edit.

More Applications

Click on “Browse More”  which will take you to the application search page.

Search Music Player

Type music player in the search box and hit enter. This should take you to the Search Results page.

Music Player application

You should be able to see the “Music Player by Facebook” application in the search results.

Click on it.

Add Music Player to Page

Click on Add to my page. This should pop-up a dialog.  Select the page.

Thats it.

You should now be able see the “Music Player” application on your page.

You can edit the “Music Player” application to upload and display albums on your fan page.

Tip: You can add the “Music Player” to any page in general, not just a Band page.

Quick Summary

Use the Facebook.showPermissionDialog FBJS api call to authorize the Page for which you are an admin. Set the enableProfileSelector to true and include the page id in the profileSelectorIds. Once  the app user has authorized and given the extended permissions, You can use the Stream.publish api call with the page id as the target id and publish on behalf of the page.

The Details – Posting to the Facebook Fan Page on behalf of the page.

Facebook allows you to create pages aka fan pages for your website, business, product, or almost just about anything. Page admins can customize their pages by adding facebook applications from the app directory to their pages. Using Facebook applications for fan pages allows you to integrate into the social connections of your fans better.

Applications with extended permissions can publish to a user’s wall, news feed stream or profile. In addition, applications can now publish to a Page wall.

Publishing to a Page as a user is fairly simple with Stream.publish facebook api, the Facebook developer api covers this well. You can prompt the user for  ’publish_stream’ extended permissions using the  fb:prompt-permission FBML tag, preferably during an initial set up workflow.

Once the user has authorized your app and given the extended permission, You just have to set the target id to the page id in your Stream.publish api call.  See the sample php api call below,

$facebook->api_client->stream_publish($message, $attachment,$action_links, $target_id);

Publishing on behalf of  a page is trickier.  Page admins have to authorize the app to publish on behalf of a page. You can do this by using

the Facebook.showPermissionDialog FBJS api call.

Facebook.showPermissionDialog('publish_stream, read_stream', ondone, showProfileSelector, [1234,2345]);

Just replace the profileSelectorIds ( [1234, 2345]) and include the page id in the FBJS call above. This should bring up a permission dialog and show

a “profile  selector” including the page for which you are an admin.

You should now be able to use the Stream.publish api call with the page id as the target id and publish on behalf of the page.

If you are new to facebook application development here are ten rules that should help you,

This is just a compilation of a message thread from the facebook developers forum.

1. Add viral features as soon as possible (best before launching your app)
2. Make things simple. Users don’t read.
3. Stupid ideas work best. Don’t try to change the world.
4. Build and program on a platform with scalability in mind.
5. KISS ( Keep it Simple Stupid )
6. If you bother to put the time in, make sure you are on a good service provider so your app actually works!
7. The answer is in the forum.
8. If you think something is broken, check facebook bugs before making massive changes
9. Don’t neglect or quit your day job, as this is all fun and games.
10. Don’t jump in head first. Create a simple app to start and learn the framework, shoot for the stars later.

Here are some more tips for social app developers from the open social folks at google

Its Day Nine and HappyWishes on FaceBook has over 100 installs. Thanks to all the users of HappyWishes, you are all in for a very surprising treat.

Thanks again and please post your reviews and suggestions on the application discussion board.

Facebook released their application platform last May. The “platform” allows developers to create applications for facebook users.

Over the past couple of weeks I have been busy creating a facebook application HappyWishes which allows facebook users to send Wishes to their friends and family for any happy occasion.

Check it out. It was fun coding it and I hope you enjoy using it.

Your comments and reviews are always welcome.