Facebook Social Plugins
Adding Facebook To Your Website
Nowadays it’s not sufficient just to have an site or blog and having a presence on the web. Every site should have a social dimension attached to it, enabling the visitors to easily share the interested content with their network. Facebook is one such a social networking site having a vision to interconnect all the sites present on the internet.
In order to achieve this interconnectivity, Facebook offers various social plugins to Webmasters for free. These plugins helps to make use of your own friends network to increase the popularity of your site.
In this article we discuss various social plugins offered by Facebook and the ways of using it effectively on your website. All these plugins can be accessed in the plugin page for Facebook’s developer.
Like Button
When visitors click on the Facebook like button added in your web page, the page is shared on their Facebook profile. This will appear in the visitor’s friends news feed with a link back to your web page. Every single like will have a potential of driving huge referral traffic to your site from your own friends network. This gives a great opportunity to drive known and relevant users to your site instead of relying on search engines.
Send Button
Facebook send button allows the visitors to instantly share the web page as a message to their friends. Unlike like button which is used to share the content on all the friends news feed, send button helps to share the content only with specific friends through a Facebook message.
For example, when a user likes a particular book selling through your site, adding a send button in your site is a real simple way to help the user to share it with specific friends.
Embedded Posts
Add any public post to your blog site using Facebook Embedded Posts plugin. This plugin can be used only to display any public posts and can’t be used if the post is set as private. If the post is deleted by the owner or the visibility is changed then blank space will be displayed in your site.
Follow Button
Facebook Follow button plugin allows the site visitors to subscribe your public updates on your Facebook timeline. This is a simple way to create a community of interested visitors for your site updates. Follow button can only be used with your personal Facebook timeline and Facebook Pages can’t be used.
Share Link Button
Share button allows the visitors to customize the links before they share through a Facebook message. Visitor can add a comment, change the title and thumbnail of the link before they share with their friends. The visitors can change the title to an attractive one for their friends and share the link of your website which has the potential of driving more traffic to the shared content.
Activity Feed
This plugin shows the visitors about their friends activities of using Facebook like and comments in the site. This is a helpful tool if you have a large group of mutual friends accessing your site, otherwise it’s of less use if the user does not have any friends visiting the site.
Recommendations Bar
Facebook Recommendations Bar allows the visitors not only to like and share your content but also display the recommended content. This is a widget combining like, share and recommendations buttons together.
Comments Box
Facebook offers a simple comments plugin which allows the users to comment on your content after logging in through their Facebook account. Especially when you created your site with the tools like Weebly, Wix or Yola which does not offer built-in comment management system, Facebook comment plugin is a simple way to add comments to your pages.For example, it is a good idea to add Facebook comments plugin in an online store.
Recommendations Button
Facebook recommendations plugin offers customized suggestions to the visitors about the pages they may be interested in. The plugin automatically collects the recommended information based on the activities on your site. When a visitor is logged into Facebook then this plugin will also consider the friends activities on the site before suggesting the recommendations. If there are very less activity on your site then it is not recommended to use this plugin since it may show a static set of recommendations to the visitor.
Like Box for Pages
Like box plugin offers you to enable your Facebook page timeline activities on your site. When you have a lot of activities happening on your page then this tool will be of much useful.
Registration
Facebook Registration plugin enables visitors to sign up for your site using their Facebook account. This is very useful plugin especially when you don’t have any registration module installed in your site. Registered users can login to your site using Facebook login plugin. Registration form will be automatically filled if the user is already in to Facebook in another browser window. This is a very useful plugin to restrict the users to visit any particular web page of your sit anonymously.
Login Button
Facebook Login button allows the user to login to your site to access any particular web page or the whole site. This also shows the profile pictures of visitor’s friend who are member of the site. Login button is to be used along with the registration button, those users registered using Facebook registration button can login to the site using their Facebook account credentials used for registration.
Facepile
Facepile plugin shows the profile picture of the visitors who liked the content or registered using Facebook registration plugin to the site. When a user sees their friends picture, it gives more comfort for the user to use your website.
