Your blog and your Facebook page are both excellent publishing tools, to build community and promote your brand identity. But how can your blog feed your Facebook page, and rapidly increase the fan engagement there? Today, I’m going to show you how your blog can bring your Facebook page to life.
Courtesy of sociable360.blogspot.com
The Facebook Blog Plugin
Facebook recently released a new plugin that WordPress blog users can customize for their own marketing purposes. The plugin essentially allows you to choose from a range of handy features, to completely streamline and enhance your blog – Facebook link. The plugin is called Facebook 1.0, and it’s available for install right now.
A Step-By-Step Plugin Install
Find the ‘install plugins’ section in the backend of your WordPress blog. Type ‘Facebook’ into the plugin search bar, and when you find it, click ‘install.’ From there WordPress tells you what you need to do to set up the plugin.
Now, it gets tricky. You’ll have to create your own Facebook app. To do this, go to the ‘create new app’ button at the top right of your screen. Fill in the app name and app namespace sections, then continue. Choose a great name, because it will display on your screen when you publish posts.
Next, you’ll fill in a setup screen – contact details, and your blog URL, and mobile version URL if you have one. Personalize your app logo and icon – your fans will be able to see these in Facebook. Once these details are complete, find and select the ‘open graph’ tab, and fill in the defined action and object sections.
In this case your action will be ‘publish’ and your object ‘article.’ Facebook gives you better directions on how to complete your open graph setup here. Anyway, the point of creating your Facebook app, is to enter the App ID, App Namespace and App Secret into your WordPress plugin. You’re done!
Adjusting The Settings To Increase Engagement
Your plugin has been installed, and done some tricky app creation to make it work. From here, it’s as simple as selecting a few settings. Configure your plugin to perform several actions to rapidly improve fan engagement, using your published posts. In the settings, you should be able to:
– Let your readers comment on your posts with their Facebook identity.
– Use a wide range of social publishing features
– Setup a recommendations bar, so that fans can recommend posts to friends
– Change the design of your social buttons, to something you find most appealing
– Add the subscribe button beneath posts to increase your readership on Facebook
– Add the send button, to improve the virality of your posts on Facebook
Each of these functions can be further customized to suit your needs. Using this one powerful Facebook app, you could bridge the gap between your two communities, to bring them together for heightened interaction. Your posts will be auto-published by Facebook, which means no penalties from Facebook Edgerank. Install yours now!
What do you think of the new Facebook – blog plugin? Worth using? Or will you stick to social syndication directly from your blog page? Share with the SMM community.