I’ve had three requests in the last month to help someone configure a website so that readers are allowed to leave comments using their Facebook profiles, so I thought I would share the process in this blog post.
There are two obvious benefits to doing enabling Facebook commenting on your website: first, doing so makes it easier for people to leave comments, so hopefully your posts will generate more comments overall. And second, as people leave comments, they’ll have the option (but not the obligation) to share their comments directly on their Facebook timeline. This will of course give your blog much more exposure as people leave comments, because their friends will see their comments as well as the blog post you wrote that inspired their friend to comment in the first place. This is one of the smarter ways to “socialize” your website and expose it to people who would otherwise not know that it exists.
Here are the steps you need to go through to allow people to comment on your blog using their Facebook account:
- Visit this page here. This is what you’ll see.
- Then click *get code*, and you’ll see this:
- You’ll need to insert the code that’s in the first box into a field that appears on all pages of your website.
- For step 4, you’ll take the the code in the second box and put that in the footer of each of your blog posts or website pages where you want to allow people to leave comments. Note that you’ll always put a different URL in the second code snippet, because it will need to be drawn from the page that you are updating.
And that’s it. I’m sure one of my friends who is an expert in web development can figure out a more elegant way to do this, but to me this seems to be a solid way to enable Facebook commenting on any WordPress post or page. If you have any thoughts on how to do this better, or if you see any problems with what I’ve setup, please feel free to embarrass me in the Facebook-enabled comments below.
Will Marlow knows a lot more about search engine marketing (PPC and SEO) than he does about WordPress. He holds four certifications in PPC advertising: Google AdWords Search Certification, Google AdWords Display Certification, Google Analytics Certification, and Bing Ads Certification.