Facebook, with collaboration with WordPress, has launched a social plugin that will help WordPress site owners make their blog more social. There are a lot of plugins or 3rd party apps available today that you can add to your WordPress blog and allow visitors to share your content on whatever social network they want. You must be wondering what is so special about this new plugin. Read on to learn more about it.
Facebook is the most visited social network today, and with the arrival of open graph, users are allowed to read news/content from social reading apps within the Facebook itself. You may know by now that whenever you connect your account to some social reader app and read an article, it automatically publish the activity to your Facebook Timeline. With the help of this latest plugin, Facebook has offered all WordPress site owners to have a social plugin on their sites, which can be installed and set up in a few minutes.
The plugin, Facebook for WordPress, allows site owners to cross-publish their WordPress blog post on their Facebook Timeline and Pages they own. It installs like any other WordPress plugin so you shouldn’t be having any difficulty in installing the plugin. Once installed, go to the plugin page, and you’ll be welcomed with the guide on how to create a Facebook app for your page and connect it with your WordPress blog.
The first thing you’ll need to do is create a Facebook app for your blog. It’s easy, you can find many articles covering the app creation guide. If you already have the app for your blog, you just have to get App ID, Secret ID and Namespace at Facebook Developers page. These things are required to connect your Facebook account with your WordPress blog so you’ll be able to add social functionality to your blog.
Once connected, you can now check the boxes by going through the options you want to have in your blog. Suppose you only want to publish the blog post on your Facebook Timeline, check the first box and keep all the boxes unchecked. In addition to that, you’ll need to grant permission for the app you just created to publish automatically on your behalf. You can also cross-post your blog content on the Facebook pages you oversee. You can preset the message you want to show as part of the Facebook post from the new custom fields in the WordPress post editor. Also, you will now be able to mention your friends or pages in posts.
More options at the Plugin page allows you to easily add Like Button, Subscribe Button, Send Button underneath the blog content. Two features that I like the most from the plugin is Facebook Comments and Recommendations Bar. Adding Facebook comments into a WordPress blog was never so easy. If you want Facebook comment box under every post of your blog, just check the box that says ‘Comments’ and you’re done. Isn’t it super easy?
The Recommendations Bar is one such feature that blog owners would love to add in their blogs but it might annoy the readers. The Recommendations Bar, when enabled from the plugin’s page, add a bar at the bottom right (by default) on all the article pages and allows visitors to like, get recommendations and share what they’re reading with their friends as they go.
The bar has a ‘Social Plugin’ feature, if visitors want to activate it, they just need to click on ‘Social Reading is Off’ and authorize the blog app, and then every single article they read on your blog will automatically be posted on their Timelines as well. The plugin is quite useful for me, as no coding is required to add this kind of functionality to the blog, and I hope it’ll come very handy for you too. Note that only WordPress.org and WordPress VIP users can use the plugin. I recommend you to try this plugin. Your views?
via (avitricks)
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