Facebook has taken one more step to mark its presence stronger in the Internet world. The flourishing social network has recently announced the release of a new plugin for WordPress -- an attempt to make it easier for bloggers of the website to spread their thoughts across the globe.
Analysts predict that the latest move will put Facebook widgets on more pages around the Web and will likely bring more content sharing to Facebook's own platform.
According to the Facebook blog, "Once the plugin is installed, you can cross-post content published to WordPress to your Facebook Timeline and the Facebook Pages you manage," Facebook engineer Matt Kelly further noted, "You can also mention the names of Pages and friends as you post to further distribute your content."
Meanwhile, following are the social plugins available as WordPress widgets:
- Activity Feed: Shows readers their friend's activity on the site, such as likes and comments.
- Recommendations: Gives readers personalized suggestions for pages on your site they might like, as well as a 'Recommendations' bar option to give users the option to add content to their Timeline as they read.
- Customizable Like, Subscribe and Send buttons.
- Comments Box: Makes it easy for people to comment on your site and post back to Facebook, and includes moderation tools. The plugin also features automatic SEO support for Facebook Comments, so search engines can index them to improve your site's visibility.
WordPress is the most popular publishing platform on the Web, powering 16.6 percent of all sites. In fact, 49 percent of the top 100 blogs in the world use WordPress, including CNN Political Ticker, Boing Boing, ArtsBeat, Grist, Hollywood Life and several blogs for The New York Times. According to Kelly, some of these blogs are already using the plugin to reach more readers.
Further, Facebook engineers and open source partners built the "Facebook for WordPress" plugin. As a part of information, no coding is necessary and the plugin is mobile-friendly and supports internationalization.
Meanwhile, the plugin will work for non-English and mobile content, according to WordPress.
