Facebook just announced a brand new way of adding social sharing feature to your blog with the ‘Like’ button.
You may be familiar with seeing the earlier ‘Become a Fan’ button. It has been replaced by ‘Like’ button and it brings a lot more features with it.
And it’s not just that. There are a bunch of social plugins and developer access like Single Sign-on, account registration data, analytics, server side presentation, etc. are available now.
Facebook have made it extremely easy to add a ‘Like’ button to a website now.
With the Like button code installed in your webpage, a user logged in to Facebook can easily give your article or site a thumbs up and share it in their wall.
You can add a Facebook Like button to your self-hosted WordPress blog with this code snippet
[cc lang=”php” tab_size=”2″ lines=”40″]<iframe src=”http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=<?php echo urlencode(get_permalink()); ?>&layout=standard&show-faces=true&width=530&height=60&action=like&colorscheme=light” scrolling=”no” frameborder=”0″ allowTransparency=”true” style=”border:none; overflow:hidden; width:530px; height:60px”></iframe> [/cc]
Note: WordPress seems to convert the html even with a code snippet plugin. You can find the actual code here at this post.
You can also find instructions on how to do this for Blogger at Digital Inspiration.
Another cool new feature is Facebook Analytics. It gives you demographic information on who likes and shares your content and this could be valuable information for your website you didn’t have before.
Activity Widget shows near-realtime information on how readers are interacting with content in your site. also interesting is the Recommendations’ widget. It is kind of a popular posts section in WordPress only this is based on number of people who ‘liked’ stories on your blog.
Facebook has added some seriously cool social features to their API and I am getting ready to try them out. How about you?
Here’s the Facebook Like button plugin available from WordPress:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/like
No coding necessary, you can customize the look and placement of the button in the settings interface
I decided to use the “Like Box” instead of the button. If you have a Facebook page already associated with your blog, you can get all your fans in one place that way, and it shows on your blog the fans you already have.
I wrote a short tutorial on doing it without plug-ins. It’s only a few steps.
http://bit.ly/aqeGuk
Thanks for the tip! I will check it out.
I have had trouble adding a Facebook like button to my blog, I used plugins that just didn’t work.