WIGHT HAT BLOG

Make your website social in 10 minutes

Adam Provis, May 6, 2011

Would you like to connect your website or blog to Facebook, so that your site visitors promote it to their Facebook friends? It’s incredibly simple to do, and a small amount of setup effort will go a long way to create more interest in your site.

Up until recently it was a much more arduous process to connect your site to the social web, but with the announcement of Facebook’s social tools it is now as easy as cutting and pasting.

You will notice at the bottom of this post a comment box. If you are logged into Facebook you will see your profile pic next to the box. If you’re not logged in you will see a button inviting you to login via Facebook or other methods such as hotmail.

There are a couple of big advantages to Facebook’s comment system compared to other methods of getting customer feedback.  The first is that nearly everyone has a Facebook login so you don’t have to ask users to sign up (as most people will not bother signing up). Of course you could invite comments without a sign in process but your post would then be spammed with Viagra adverts. The second advantage is that comments made on the post will also show on the user’s wall. This will be visible to the visitor’s friends, who can then comment on the comment either directly on Facebook or on the post itself.  Any comments made in Facebook will appear both on your site and on the wall of anyone involved in the discussion. This can give your site a massive amount of extra visibility, attract more visitors and create an interactive discussion.

Here’s how it’s done:

1. Go to the Facebook comment wizard page: click here
2. Fill in the wizard information: URL, how many posts to show, width and colour scheme
3. Hit the ‘Get code’ button and copy the code generated
4. Add the code to the page or template where you want the comment box

You may well wish to moderate the comments. To do this, here are a couple more steps:

1. Get you Facebook ID (if you are not sure how to get this click here)
2. Put the following meta tag into the head section of you page or template:
   <meta property=”fb:admins” content=”{YOUR_FACEBOOK_USER_ID}”/>

If moderation has been set you will receive a notification in your Facebook account when someone makes a comment. You can then choose to show or hide the comment.

That’s it! Your site or blog is now part of the social web. Try the comment box below to see this in action and, of course, if you like this post, please click ‘like’.

 

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