Anyone who has any involvement in online promotion will have a Facebook profile. Hence the opportunity to combine your Facebook feed with your WordPress website offers a huge amount of potential for sharing posts and receiving comments and ‘likes’ with and from a much bigger audience.
Why do I need WordPress Facebook plugins?
Quite simply because there are nearly 1.2 billion people worldwide using Facebook. It is not hard to work out that within that huge market is a fair percentage of your target audience. Your target audience want a mixture of news, entertainment, personal interaction and information on products and services. This is what you can provide from your site with one of the many great WordPress Facebook plugins. Sharing your Facebook feed on your site is a simple way to make it more attractive and complement whichever one of the great WordPress themes that you choose.
Whether you are sharing your personal life through a blog, expanding a hobby or hosting a fully-fledged business through your site, WordPress Facebook plugins provide a helping hand in reaching the people that want what you have. And as a result they can provide a huge boost in your traffic.
There aren’t a huge amount of good WordPress Facebook plugins that are dedicated specifically to Facebook. Some of the best support Facebook but also carry functionality to promote the other major social media platforms such as Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn and StumbleUpon etc. Chances are you have a profile on many of these anyway, but you may only want to promote your Facebook feed? That is fine, and these plugins can provide you with whatever functionality you need.
Here, we have provided a mixture of the best dedicated WordPress Facebook plugins along with the best multi-functional plugins.
Facebook for WordPress
With this plugin you can grow your audience with shared stories powered by the Facebook ‘like’ and ‘send’ buttons. You can publish new content to your Facebook timeline or to your site’s Facebook page. This is also one of the best WordPress Facebook plugins for growing your subscriber audience as a ‘follow’ button allows visitors to do exactly that. Another great feature is the Facebook-powered comments section, which you see on many other sites. Here, threaded comments are Facebook-hosted but are added to your WordPress site and backed by Facebook identities and moderation. You can also embed Facebook public post content into WordPress posts by posting a link or constructing shortcode.
Social Box
This plugin covers all the major social media platforms and is an easy-to-use plugin that installs a sleek social media widget onto your WordPress site. Social Box allows you to display the number of Facebook ‘likes’ you have on your site, which is a good visual tool for promoting the success of your site. In addition to this all your posts are easily sharable.
Facebook Survivor
A great user-friendly plugin for integrating Facebook with your WordPress site. Facebook Survivor allows visitors to feel comfortable on your website because it uses their Facebook images and it is really easy for you to post on users Facebook wall and for visitors to post on yours, all whilst ensuring visitors don’t leave your WordPress site. There is also a new, simple Facebook login button rather than a registration form to ensure that you don’t lose visitors put off my having to register.
NextGen Facebook
Despite the name, NextGen Facebook doesn’t just support the one social media platform. That said, it does take a more detailed look at how you can improve your WordPress site’s visibility with Facebook. It helps you improve your Facebook page’s appearance, ranking and engagement but also adds open graph and rich pin meta tags and validates image dimensions to provide accurate media. This plugin also includes author and publisher profile URLs for Facebook.
WordPress Social Stream
Again this does not just cover Facebook, and can combine all your social media profiles into one single feed. Social Stream can display your Facebook profile but also a rotating feed list of your other active social media profiles. Of course you can also share your WordPress posts easily via Facebook.
Recent Facebook Posts
This is a popular and very simple plugin which allows you to keep visitors up to date with your Facebook activity. The plugin displays your latest posts directly onto your site and also supports public pages that might be of interest. Recent Facebook posts is highly customisable and also very SEO-friendly.
Social Media Feather
Here is a simple, lightweight yet effective plugin that looks fantastic. Social Media Feather offers you the power to easily and quickly add ‘follow’ and ‘share’ buttons to posts and pages in a way that is unobtrusive but has maximum impact. This plugin supports retina display and as such is fully responsive to all devices. It also supports shortcodes, which means the Facebook sharing options can be placed anywhere on your site.
Facebook Likebox Slider for WordPress
A bit of a mouthful, but an attractive plugin that looks great, via an appealing tab design. A three-step process makes this very easy to install and use and the plugin comes with very good 24-hour technical support. Again, this is a mobile-ready and fully responsive plugin and is an easy way to increase your likes, shares and ultimately traffic. The name is once more quite misleading, as this plugin does support other social media.
Social Sidebar for WordPress
With this plugin you can add social links to your WordPress site and style them using CSS3. It is compatible with all browsers as it is built around HTML5. Social Sidebar supports automatic integration and has great features such as 100 different icons, four different themes, and can be placed on the left or the right sidebar to suit. The 24-hour support feature is also very impressive.
Multi Facebook Pages and Groups Posts
Not a plugin title that trips off the tongue but a very functional plugin that displays Facebook Recent Posts as a sidebar widget on your WordPress site. You can add more than one Facebook page, customise your colours and determine the number of posts per page. This plugin is also fully responsive as it uses the bootstrap framework.