Facebook Like and Share buttons are popping up on each and every prominent site. As your readers share your content, more and more visitors will find their way to your site. As Facebook continues its dominance across the globe, utilizing sexy Facebook tools and buttons will provide not only a familiar attractive button/plugin for your users, but also give them an easy way to interact and share content with their friends.
While you’ll find plugins and widgets from third party sites, I believe the best ones are available right under your nose on the Facebook Dev site. Take a look at the eight widgets below and let me know which ones you are using.
By displaying a handy Facebook Like button on your site, your content gets shared when users click Like. It will then appear in their News Feed with a link back to your site.
Using the Open Graph Protocol, you can specify information about your site, including tags, description, image, URL and more. Once established, your site will become equivalent to a Facebook page. When a user clicks the Like button on your page, your page will then appear in the “Likes and Interests” section of Facebook user’s profiles, which will enable you to publish updates to them. Your site will also appear in Facebook searches.
This plugin shows personalized recommendations for your users. The plugin utilizes social interactions with URLs from your site and gives preference to logged in Facebook users, highlighting what and how they’ve interacted.
This plugin shows all the recent activity on your site. It displays personalized content whether the user is logged into Facebook or not. It shows articles when the users like content from your site and when they share it on Facebook. When a user is logged into Facebook, it personalizes content from their friends. You can specify the domain to show activity for it, as I’ve done in the example below.
The Facebook Live Stream plugin gives users who visit your site a place to share their activity and comment in real-time. If you are running a live event, such as streaming content on your site, it is very ideal to further engage with your viewers.
Need More?
Comments Box - The Comments Box lets your users comment on your site content and share the comment on their Facebook Wall and their friend’s live stream. To administer your comments box, you’ll have to be listed as a developer.
FacePile - This plugin shows Facebook Profile Pictures of user’s friends who’ve signed up for your site. You can modify the number of rows of pics to display and it dynamically resizes the height. The plugin only displays for users who are logged in.
Login Button – This button displays profile pictures of user’s friends who’ve previously signed up for your site. You can specify how many rows of faces to display and it dynamically resizes the height.
Which Facebook buttons/widgets/plugins do you use? Let us know below.
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