New York — In an attempt to make a strong foothold in bloggers community, social networking humongous Facebook on Tuesday released a plugin for the WordPress blogging tool that bridges the gap between the two for cross-posting content, enabling tighter, cleaner, and simpler integration between millions of WordPress blogs and Facebook.
With extensive integrations for WordPress.org and WordPress.com bloggers now have good reason to rejoice, as there is one more way to get stories out into the public, enabling you to include your blog content to the social media network with just a single click.
In fact, the move will place Facebook widgets on more pages around the Web and will likely generate more content sharing to Facebook’s own platform. WordPress software is employed to create 17 percent of all Web content, according to Facebook’s announcement, accounting for 600 million unique visitors a month. The New York Times’ website uses WordPress, for example.
Facebook engineers and open source partners devised the ‘Facebook for WordPress’ plugin. Thus, no coding is necessary and the plugin is mobile-friendly as well and supports internationalization.
“Once the plugin is activated, you can simultaneously post content that is published to WordPress to your Facebook Timeline and the Facebook Pages you administer,” Facebook engineer Matt Kelly wrote in a blog post today. “You can also mention the names of Pages and friends as you post to further distribute your content.”
Ways to use the “Facebook for WordPress” plugin. (Credit: Facebook)
According to the Facebook blog, the following social plugins are available as WordPress widgets:
- Activity Feed: Shows readers their friends’ activity on the site, such as likes and comments.
- Recommendations: Gives readers personalized suggestions for pages on your site they might like, as well as a Recommendations Bar option to give users the option to add content to their Timeline as they read.
- Customizable Like, Subscribe and Send buttons.
- Comments Box: Makes it easy for people to comment on your site and post back to Facebook, and includes moderation tools. The plugin also features automatic SEO support for Facebook Comments, so search engines can index them to improve your site’s visibility.
In addition to the above, Facebook for WordPress plugin is almost similar to what you would find on an app that utilizes Open Graph. Besides, all of these aims to make your WordPress site more social and visible to those who also use Facebook. An example would be using the Activity Feed plugin which shows people what their friends are liking and sharing on the site.
WordPress is the most popular publishing platform on the Web, powering 16.6 percent of all sites. However, the integrations are made possible via a Facebook for WordPress plugin that can be downloaded here.
Also, the features are displayed as lists of options that can be selected under Facebook settings and widgets settings. The plugin will work for non-English and mobile content, according to WordPress. Overall, it is pretty easy to install the Facebook for WordPress plugin, but here is a handy tutorial if you are new to this.