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May 09 2010

How To Get The Best Out of Facebook Social Plugins – Part I

Author: Panah | Tags:
Filed under: Facebook View Comments
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Facebook has been growing quite rapidly in the past few months. There are no signs that the company is stopping anytime soon. In fact, with its latest announcement, Facebook has told the world that it is here to stay, and we all better get used to it. Facebook need not be your enemy if you are a blogger. Sure, I consider Facebook to be distracting and something that makes me less productive. At the same time, it does offer bloggers the opportunity to get the word out about their posts and build a more solid community around their blog.

Facebook’s Social Plugins program is a set of tools that are developed to help website owners bring more interactivity to their websites. Whether you are a blogger hoping for your readers to recommend your top posts or a portal owner interested in letting the world know about your top articles, Facebook has a tool for you. There are at least 8 ways you can integrate Facebook Social plugins into your blog and take it to the next level. In this post, I am going to focus on the standard boxes and buttons. But let’s not forget there are more advanced ways to bring Facebook to your website.

As a blogger, you want to make sure the word gets out about your posts on Facebook. You also want to create a Facebook fan page for your blog and push it on your blog. Facebook Social plugins not only enable you to do those, it also can recommend your top links to your readers and even allow your readers to comment on your blog using their Facebook account. To implement these features, you are going to need these 4 tools:

  • Like Button: adds a like button to your blog posts. It’s dynamic, so you can make it work with Wordpress or your specific blogging platform. What’s fun about this tool is the fact that it does not take more than just a click to work, but it can have a huge affect on the amount of traffic you receive and retain from Facebook. It can also be very compact, so your pages don’t look too busy to your readers.
  • Like Box: if you have taken the time to start a Facebook page for your blog (which you should have), adding a Like Box to your blog will make it easier for your readers to give your Facebook page a thumbs up and become a fan of your blog as well. You can go beyond the simple box and show the faces of your visitors on your sidebar as well.
  • Comments: let’s face it. Your visitors are not going to jump through hoops to leave comments on your blog. If you make the process easy for them, they’ll jump at the chance. Otherwise, only your hardcore fans will take the time to go through your registration process just to leave a comment on your blog. Now if you are using Wordpress, the process is fairly easy. Nevertheless, it never hurts to give people the option to leave comments on your blog by using Facebook credentials.
  • Recommendations: my favorite plugin so far. The other plugins on this list are pretty much what we have seen from Facebook in the past. This tool looks at how people interact with your pages and recommends your top links to your visitors. If you are getting a whole lot of traffic from Facebook, this plugin is a must install.

There are of course many other social tools that you can grab from Facebook. You do not want to go overboard with these tools. So you have to be somewhat creative to get the best out of them. At the same time, these tools should give you the extra motivation to build outposts for your blog on other top social networking websites. The web as we know it is changing very rapidly. Facebook is changing too. However, it will be around for the foreseeable future. There is simply no reason not to take advantage of the tools that are provided to you by Facebook at this point (even though Facebook is far from perfect).



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