Wp Wordpress

Jan 09 2008

Category: Themes and Tricks

• CSS We Are The Buzz (5 out of 5)
• Throw (5 out of 5)
• qmula (5 out of 5)
• Heartworker (5 out of 5)
• Decently Exposed (5 out of 5)
• DePo Masthead (3 out of 5)
• Sinklar (3 out of 5)
• Simple WordPress Theme - SimpleWP (3 out of 5)
• Arman Adhitama (3 out of 5)
• Michelle Dinan (3 out of 5)

As if MySpace and LinkedIn and all the 100s of other social networking sites weren’t enough, now you have Facebook. But this ones a bit different though, which is why they flourished in the first place when all other MySpace copycats are going bust..

Well I don’t want to make this a tutorial on signing up and using Facebook, so if you’re not on Facebook yet you may want to register and create a profile to see how it works. For all those already on Facebook, in this mini-tutorial I’m going to show you how to syndicate your latest blog posts to your Facebook profile and get traffic from it.

The good news is that, this entire Facebook thing is made easy with a Wordpress Facebook plugin called “Wordbook”. You can read about & download the plugin here. As with any Wordpress plugin, you’d want to upload the correct folder to wp-content/plugins and activate it in your Wordpress dashboard.

Once you’ve activated this Wordpress Facebook plugin, go to Options > Wordbook and you’ll need to click a link that goes to a specific Facebook page where you need to allow the plugin to access your Facebook data. You’ll then receive a “One Time Code” which you need to enter is your Wordbook application page

Once you’ve done that, you’ll be prompted to add a Facebook App (application) to your account

Once you’ve done that, your Facebook “mini-feed” will syndicate your latest blog posts. However, it will only add future (new) blog posts and not the old ones, so you may need to publish a post or two to see the results. In the end it will look like this, with a WordPress logo net to your latest posts:

You latest blog posts will be mixed with your latest Facebook profile activities, and the Wordbook WordPress plugin will also syndicate any images on your blog (resized) to your Facebook profile.

Some limitations of the plugin:

• You can only add ONE blog, not the 100 or so you have. I was torn between syndicating feeds From EasyWordpress.com or GobalaKrishnan.com but eventually went with the latter since it’s my prsonal blog
• Syndicates ALL posts even off topic ones. You cannot pick and choose which posts should appear in Facebook, so you may want to tidy up your Facebook profile by hiding (or removing) all the other not-so-useful stuff that clutters your page

So how do you get more traffic to your Facebook profile, who will in turn click on your blog links and subscribe to your RSS feed?

The answer is socialize! Add more friends to your Facebook profile, but please take note that this is not MySpace - if you add people you don’t know and start spamming them you’ll get banned very quickly. Plus, you have to use your real name, and if possible certify your Facebook account by verifying your phone number.

Get the plugin: Facebook Wordpress Plugin

Add Me as A Friend: Add me in Facebook

(Make sure you mention you’re a “reader of EasyWordpress” cos I don’t want to bulk up Facebook with people I don’t know. Facebook isn’t about how many thousand friends you have, and I’d like to have as little strangers in there as possible)