Facebook and WordPress

We going to be talking about Facebook and WordPress. Many people in the WordPress development community feel it is not as important as Twitter. However, according to a Washington Post article last year, the number of people who use Facebook is nearly equal to the number of people living in China. How many people is that? About 900 million. You have to agree that is amazing!

With numbers like that, it would be hard to argue that Facebook isn’t worth your time if you run an online business or any business really. Social media, Facebook and online social sharing in general is the lifeblood for many businesses.

If you’re not doing what you can to tap into that pool of possible clients, you’re likely missing out on a large audience who are thirsty for what you have to offer.

One of the easiest (and least expensive) ways to gain engagement (clicks, likes, follows and comments) is to display something related to FB in the widgetized areas of your site so that people can quickly connect with you.

I’m going to look at a number of WP plugins that have been developed to help you integrate your WordPress powered website with Facebook.

Jetpack: we are going to start with Jetpack. Yes, Jetpack has a nice simple Facebook plugin that provides good basic functionality. We seem to have started with Jetpack quite a bit in this series; however, it does offer quite a bit in the social media area.

Facebook: has a native WordPress plugin, which is fully featured.

Not only does it have six Facebook widgets packed inside, it also has some great features to go along with it like using Open Graph for optimized shares, and short-codes for embedding in posts and pages. It uses the Facebook API to connect things, but it’s pretty easy to setup and get going.

Simple Facebook Plugin: if you are looking for a more simple solution then the previous two plugins this one might be perfect for you. It’s not only widget-friendly but it provides short-code functionality for posts and pages.

Here’s an example of how Simple Facebook Plugin displays Facebook content:

GoViral Facebook Share Popup: is a very powerful but expensive WP Facebook plugin solution at $300 +. However, if getting your website visitors to join your Facebook page is an important objective for you—this could be the solution you are looking for.

Facebook Page Promoter Lightbox: has some of the functionality that GoViral offers at a much affordable price i.e. it’s basically free. However, GoViral is a very basic plugin, but, if you looking for a simple plugin that has great lightbox functionality this might be just right for you.

Takeaways

What you can see from this small selection is that there are a lot of choices for how you’re going to link your WordPress-powered website to Facebook effectively. These range from giving people a simple of way of sharing your latest post on Facebook to methods of showing your Facebook fans’ latest comments on your WordPress website. Just remember, Facebook is a daily habit for almost everyone online these days, so being there puts your site in the mainstream of potential customers’ lives.

 

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