5 Ways to Integrate WordPress with Facebook

Despite its many competitors, Facebook still remains the king when it comes to social media. It stands to reason, therefore, that most WordPress websites could benefit from learning to integrate WordPress with Facebook – but how?

Facebook offers plenty of features that work well alongside WordPress such as its reaction system, and social media login functions. If you can get your social media to work for you, you can definitely improve your overall WordPress experience.

In this post, we’ll explore five different ways to integrate WordPress with Facebook, including which tools you need to use, and brief advice on how to put them into action. Let’s get started!

📚 Table of contents:

Add Facebook reactions to WordPress
Display page feeds in your posts and pages
Enable users to log in using their Facebook profiles
Add a Facebook Like widget
Show your Facebook comments in WordPress

1. Add Facebook reactions to WordPress

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past couple of years, you’re likely familiar with Facebook reactions. They’re simply a set of emoticons representing how users feel about a particular post or publication, and they could be seen as an extension of Twitter and Instagram’s own Like feature:

These emoticons enable Facebook users to share how they feel about the posts in question, without having to comment on them. It’s far more flexible than the Like system, and it requires no effort.

As far as WordPress goes, you can achieve a similar effect using the DW Reactions plugin:

This tool enables you to insert a reaction system almost anywhere on your WordPress site. It shares a similar design to Facebook’s version, and includes over 300 emojis from which you can choose your reactions style.

The plugin also keeps track of how many people choose each reaction and displays it to others, so everyone can see how the community feels about any given post. It’s dead simple to set up, but if you need some help, check out our other post, where we focus solely on Facebook reactions and how to add them to WordPress

2. Display page feeds in your posts and pages

A Facebook feed is essentially a bunch of publications organized according to their category. For example, each time you log in to the platform, you’re greeted by a news feed, and when you enter a profile, you’re looking at a user feed:

Integrating Facebook feeds into WordPress enables us to display this information as either a part of a page, or as a widget. It can be useful if you want to share a particular feed with your visitors, or integrate your own timeline as a widget. The latter also enables you to promote your Facebook account without being too pushy.

We can do both of these things using the Facebook Feed WD plugin, which supports the publication of page, public group, and profile feeds:

All integrated feeds will refresh regularly, and pictures will also open using a lightbox. If you like how that sounds, check the plugin’s official setup instructions.

3. Enable users to log in using their Facebook profiles

This particular approach on how to integrate WordPress with Facebook is rather interesting. Facebook enables third-party apps to use their login feature, which means that users don’t need to create a new account with your website to log in. All they have to do is authorize the use of their Facebook account info.

From a practical standpoint, this is a great proposition. Most of us interact with so many sites and websites on a day-to-day basis that keeping track of individual accounts can be a pain. Furthermore, it may be the case that some users who may not have wanted to sign up under normal circumstances will do so once they see that you offer a Facebook login feature.

Implementing it is quite simple too. It involves, as you may have imagined, a plugin – Facebook Login:

To enable the function on your site, you’ll firstly need to obtain a Facebook App ID. Once you have it, follow rest of the steps outlined in the plugin’s official instructions. They’re quite simple, don’t fret!

4. Add a Facebook Like widget

Facebook Likes need no introduction. They’re the system that eventually spawned the more complex reactions we discussed during the first point, and a fantastic way to raise engagement. To hammer the point home, ask yourself this: When you’re browsing Facebook (instead of working), are you more likely to be interested in a publication with lots of likes and reactions, or one with zero?

If your answer is the former, you’re not alone. As far as WordPress is concerned, you can display how many Likes your Facebook page has, which in turn tells users you are worth following. There are a myriad of ways to do this; however, we recommend the Easy Facebook Like Box plugin:

With this plugin, you can display a widget for your Facebook page that keeps track of the number of Likes, and shows an image grid of people who recently gave you the thumbs up. Furthermore, you can also include a Like function for your posts and pages, so that users can show others which content they’ve enjoyed. As always, check out the plugin’s official configuration instructions if you have any doubts.

5. Show your Facebook comments in WordPress

Facebook and WordPress comment sections aren’t that different if you take them at face value. However, the former has two distinct advantages over the latter.

First of all, it enables people to comment using their existing accounts, which works well with the Facebook login method we discussed earlier. Secondly, by using Facebook comments, you also get access to their built-in Like function, which makes popular comments rise to the top. That, in turn, could help foster discussion around your posts.

To add this functionality, we recommend using the Facebook Comments WordPress plugin. Aside from enabling the implementation of Facebook comment sections, it also provides you with plenty of customization choices.

You can set how many comments should appear, how they are positioned, where the section appears, and even its background color. To set things up, you’ll need a Facebook App ID. Then you can follow the plugin’s official (yet sparse) documentation to get everything else set up.

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Conclusion

Learning how to integrate WordPress with Facebook can help you improve user experience on your website. It enables users to show how they feel about your content, interact with one other, and even help you promote your Facebook page in the process. That’s a win-win situation, any way you look at it!

There are plenty of ways you can integrate WordPress with Facebook. Let’s recap: