Adding Facebook Recommendations Bar To Your Website

I kept seeing a nice Recommendations bar pop up on websites. After attending an SEO/Wordpress meeting and keeping up with how internal links and time spent on the site helps with SEO I decided to get this going last night. I looked into it further and it was actually ran by Facebook. It seems there are a couple of different ways to have this on your site.  I went with the easiest one I could which is not by Facebook. I will give you a step by step on how to add it the way I did. Please note this is for WordPress only.

Adding Facebook Recommendations Bar To Your Website:

1.) Install/Download the Plugin. If you search for it in WordPress it’s “Facebook Recommendations Bar” By Alex Moss. Here is the link to the plugin as well http://3doordigital.com/wordpress/plugins/facebook-recommendations-bar/

2.) Now you will need to create an actual Facebook App. Log in to Facebook and go to https://developers.facebook.com/apps

3.) Click Create New

4.) Type in the name of your app. The one I did for this site I just called it North san diego. The namespace is the URL friendly version so I did north-san-diego. Fill those 2 out and hit continue.

5.) Now you will be brought to the different options for your app. Put in the domain name under App Domains. I just hit “news” for the category and left the sandbox mode disabled.

6.) Below there are different options for your app. All I did was entered the URL of the website in the “Website with facebook login” and under the “mobile web” section. Then hit save changes at the bottom. Note** I did mess around with some of the other settings and it gave me errors when I tried it. So I just stuck with the easiest way to get it to work. With the plugin in this post all you need is the App ID #.

7.) Now go back into WordPress and open up the Facebook Recommendations Bar settings.

8.) Enter in your Facebook App ID #

9.) I left the Enable FBML checked. Then you just have a couple of options. I checked posts/pages. I kept the Verb the same. Read time will be how long the visitor to that page is on there before the pop up box comes up. I changed it to 15 seconds but you can change it to whatever you would like. Then the number of recommendations I left it at 2.

10.) That’s it! Just go to a page/post on your site and it should work. Mine does interfere with the Wibiya Social Share Bar across the bottom. I believe if you use the plugin that Facebook has itself you are able to customize manually where the box goes. I will write another post if I end up doing it that way.

The bar itself is pretty cool. You can like the post right off of the bar. I will see what happens with it and what articles it recommends to me and some of the other bloggers on the site. I will write a follow up post with information about that. Happy Blogging!

Tags: article, articles, back linking, blog post, bloggers, blogging, facebook, facebook recommendations, internal linking, online marketing, social media, social media marketing, time spent

Category: Facebook