Facebook just released a WordPress plugin this week that makes it super easy to integrate your WordPress blog with Facebook Pages and Timelines. It’s called the Facebook for WordPress and is available in the WordPress plugins directory.
Watch the Video
I made a video that shows how to set up and configure the plugin, and demo some of the cool things it can do:
Deep Integration – No Code Required
The plugin provides some deep integration between self-hosted WordPress blogs and Facebook Timelines and Pages in three major areas:
1) Social Publishing and Mentions
It allows you to publish on friends timelines and on Facebook Page timelines whenever you Publish a new blog post in WordPress with “mentions”.
2) Social Plugins on WordPress Pages and Posts
These include Like, Send, Share and Subscribe buttons on your WordPress Posts and Pages. You can also replace WordPress comments with Facebook comments, which are indexed by the search engines now. You can also provide a “Recommendation” bar.
3) WordPress Widgets
The Plugin provides several WordPress Widgets for Recommendations, Activity streams, Like, Send and Subscribe buttons.
You can also configure it to automatically publish new blog posts to the Author’s timeline, or to any other Facebook Pages you control.
Here’s Facebook’s description of the plugin.
Have you tried this yet? Let me know what you think in the comments below ok?
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Article by » Don Campbell
Don is an entrepreneur based in Silicon Valley. He founded Expand2Web and is the publisher of the Expand2Web Blog and the SmallBiz WordPress Theme.
Don has written 248 articles on Expand2Web
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{ 36 comments… read them below or add one }
Fantastic, thank you! Your videos are a huge time saver and so helpful.
Thanks for the kind words Eileen. I love making these.
Awesome Don! As always, great stuff. Can you post a video or some info for getting and adding the code for the Subscribe Button option within the Facebook plug-in?
That’s a good idea. Will do. Thanks Dr. Jeri.
FYI: It looks like the new Facebook Like button isn’t playing nicely with the Really simple Facebook Twitter share buttons. Does anyone have a plugin suggestion, I want to include Google+, email, maybe Pinterest and of course Twitter sharing options. https://skitch.com/eileenlonergan/eb4f9/facebook-wp-plugin-conflict
I have the same issue; it’s a bit absurd for Facebook to think that they’re the only service we want to share on. I’d like these plugins to be able to work alongside each other too.
Sorry for all the posts, http://www.riyaz.net/getsocial/ Get Social worked just fine with the FB WP app.
Thanks for sharing this Eileen!
Hey Don – On the video the blog page has the social media icons, and it looks like the expand2web widget, but it includes G+. Have I missed something, or is that a different widget to get G+ in the social media widget?
Thanks for this video on the FB plugin…mucho helpful.
Hi Geoff,
That’s the social media widget that comes with the SmallBiz theme. I was using SmallBiz for the site in this demo.
I thought it was. I’m using version 3.7b and I don’t see a G+ option. Just FB, Twitter, YouTube and LI. Do I need too activate or do something to get the G+?
Geoff,
thank you for getting in touch with us.
We provide free theme upgrades to all of our customers.
I will contact you via your comment email address with an updated theme version that includes Google+.
I will also send you “just” the icon in case you want to add it manually to your site without upgrading.
Would also like the Google addition, please.
Val
Wait a minute…..does integrating this new Facebook for WordPress plugin mean no more regular comments on a blog? Can I have both? Are you trading one for the other? Are you giving me the status of annoying little sister?
It looks like an either-or proposition – either you use WordPress comments or Facebook comments.
While it is a cool feature, I’m not planning to implement Facebook comments on my blog. Although they are indexed by Google (they weren’t at first!) I believe Facebook owns that content and I want to own all the comments on my blog.
The benefit you get from using them of course, is that people’s comments also show up on their Facebook timeline which helps spread the word about your blog post to many people.
This is awesome, thanks for posting!
Note that we just pushed an update to the plugin. You can see the changelog at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/facebook/changelog/ Keep the feedback coming!
That’s great Matt – looks like there are a lot of good fixes and changes in that update. Thanks for dropping by to let us know!
OMG!!! Facebook just left you a comment!!! How cool is that!!!
Great video on how to do this. I had “you” playing in one widow and followed along in the admin area in another window. It worked the first time through. I certainly appreciate you taking time to provide the instructions.
That’s great – thanks for stopping by and letting me know Bill!
Hi, Great video. However, WP tells me I must install and activate the parent framework. Do you know how to do this? Thanks, Susan
Hi Susan,
This sounds like it has to do with your WordPress Theme, not the Facebook Plugin. Check with your theme provider, they should be able to help you out.
Hi Don,
Great video. Unfortunately, it did not work for me. I thought it might be because I did not get the free host but after looking at the video again I see you did not do that step either. Any suggestions?
Susan, what step are you referring to? What is not working?
I’ve always been confused about wordpress.com and wordpress.org. I have a site at wordpress.com…I don’t see that “Plug In” though?
Hi Christina,
WordPress.com limits which plugins you can use. Here’s a blog post I wrote that describes the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org: http://www.expand2web.com/blog/wordpressorg-vs-wordpresscom-which-one-should-i-use/
Thanks for the post, Don Campbell. This video is really helpful to me and for other young wordpress beginner.
Nice tutorial but some things have changed since this was created. You have to create and get actions approved now as far as I know in order to allow the blog posts to post right into your timeline.
I set mine up, got the action approved by facebook and created a blog posting and it publishes to my timeline. When I am logged into my WordPress admin panel, and click on the link on my timeline, it goes to the story with no problems. If I am not logged in as an Admin, it gives me a 403 access denied page. Not sure how to solve this issue.
I’ve got the plugin installed and everything. I’m trying to post to my own timeline (not a page timeline), and every time it only puts the info in my “Recent Activity” box and not on my timeline. Anyone else having issues with this particular feature?
Opps… I hit do not allow when I was setting up the Social Publisher and now I have a disabled in the box that should list my pages… how can I change that? Do I need to deactivate the plugin and start over?
Does this only work for personal Facebook accounts and not website page FB accounts, because I don’t see the create an app option anywhere, and anytime I follow a link to FB (such as developers.facebook.com/apps) in one of these tutorials, it just brings me to my FB page.
I don’t have a FB personal account, but I have a few WP blogs on different topics and would like to have a FB presence, but I just don’t understand how this works for FB pages.
Jim, I tested it with both personal and Facebook business pages. You have to have a personal FB account to administer a business Facebook Page though.
hi, i’ve got a problem with this plugin, whenever i activate it, it disables my wordpress comment.
I would like to know how to fix this so that both the Facebook comment and the Wordpress comment show on each post
Seems that the Facebook plugin has gotten more complicated since this video was created–at least for the Social Publisher part. Would you consider doing another video?
Thanks Don, thanks to this video I was able to easily link Facebook to my blog
Thanks! Like Megan pointed out, the Social Publisher has changed it’s way to configure, anyone struggling with this like me?
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