Integrate Facebook With Your Blog

Do you like Facebook ? If at all your answer is “No”. Then it is a humble suggestion to start liking it. Even in markets where it doesn’t dominate the social web, Facebook is catching up and will likely succeed. Facebook is a great way to get additional exposure for your content, in my recent post I told you about How To Drive Traffic From Facebook?. Whether you re-publish your blog content directly on Facebook, or you use something like Facebook Connect to add the Facebook login/profile experience to your own site, you will be surely getting traffic from it.

Here are some great ways to integrate your website or blog with Facebook.

Custom CMS or XHTML site

Using WordPress to power your site has become very common many people have their site either custom CMS or something coded in XHTML/PHP.

If you are one of them, then the Facebook Developer Wiki is a great source of information. Facebook also has the Facebook Connect Wizard and Facebook Connect Playground, which was launched recently before few days. That makes implementing Facebook Connect into your site easier, and also offers up sample code and widgets for comment boxes, Facebook Connect buttons, and more.

Movable Type/TypePad

Like WordPress there many different blogging platforms. One of them is Movable Type by Six Apart, Last December, Six Apart released the Facebook Connect Commenters plugin for Movable Type. This will let users log in with their Facebook credentials, leave a comment, and then share those actions on Facebook (so comments show-up in mini-feeds, etc.).

TypePad is another blogging platform by Six Apart, they’ve built Facebook compatibility into the newest release, letting you post to your blog from Facebook, show your updates on Facebook, and let users comment using Facebook or Twitter IDs.

WordPress

We all know that WordPress is best blogging platform and we cannot ignore it in any ways. Given WordPress’s vibrant community, you’d think that integrating Facebook into your WordPress site would be a breeze.

Well, it isn’t hard that much, as there are many good and useful plugins available for it. Never fear, here are some great resources and tools for integrating your WordPress blog with your Facebook page:

1. Sociable Facebook Connect – Sociable.es has an awesome Facebook connect plugin, which is being updated frequently. And offers other features, like the ability to add a box displaying recent visitors, commentators, friends and also it is compatible in Thesis Theme. Be aware that the Sociable plugin will create a new user for your Facebook Connect users on your blog (this isn’t always ideal).
2. WP-FBConnect – This plugin was made by Facebook’s engineer Adam Hupp. Although it has not been updated from long time. With this plugin users can use their Facebook login to leave comments (and have them published to their feed) and have their Facebook avatar show up (with a Facebook designation) on your site. Check out Adam Breckler’s excellent tutorial for more help with this plugin.
3. Add Your Blog Feed – Don’t like adding a Facebook connect on your blog? Then you can publish your feeds there, so that your readers read your blog there and comment there.

Come And Share

You know that awesome “Share on Facebook” button. There are many good plugins for it. Don’t I will make easier for you. I use fbshare, on my blog and it’ s really good and easy. You can control everything from the admin area of plugin if you are using WordPress, or else you can make changes in the code.

Conclusion

Facebook, is one of biggest social networking site, you cannot miss it, or you will lose great potential. And hope the above tips helps you in connecting your blog with Facebook.

Don’t forget to follow RSS Feed or via E-Mail to get latest feed and also don’t forget to follow on Twitter for latest updates.