Last week Facebook and WordPress announced a plugin that will link both social-media platforms: posts on your nonprofit’s WP blog will be updated in your nonprofit’s Facebook Timeline, and your blog entries can have ‘Like’ and ‘Recommend’ buttons on them. One of the great things about the WordPress blogging platform is indeed the plugin feature: most are free and open source. And though establishing a WordPress content-management system (CMS) is not the easiest thing to do, installing plugins is a snap as the established site does all the work for you!
So how do WP and Facebook talk to each other?
First off, you will need some technical information concerning your Facebook account: your App ID, your App Secret, and your App Nameplace (the one thing that is not a random string of letters and numbers). You’ll need to get that information from the App Developers’ site at Facebook, and you need to copy-and-paste precisely the codes Facebook renders to link the plug in to it.
Click to enlargeOnce that bit of techno-code is found and pasted into the three appropriate fields on the top of your Facebook Plugin Settings, the rest is fairly straightforward and depends mostly on how you want your buttons to look and behave on your organization’s blog and Facebook page. You can allow Mentions to show up in the Timeline of Facebook (or not), establish ‘Like’ buttons on your blog post (surely the point of setting up this plugin in the first place!), and encourage people on your organization’s Facebook page to subscribe to the blog with a click of a single button.
Do note that if your organization has a few staff members who post to your blog on WordPress, each of them must verify her or his access both to the blog and to your charity’s Facebook page to have the features you set up available for everyone’s posts.
Once set up and saved, you can check out appearances and behaviors on both the blog and your Facebook page. As long as the ID and Secret are good, the other settings can be tweaked to your liking as you proceed and test. Moreover, Facebook will be keeping track on your communication web via the ‘Insights’ button within the WordPress Dashboard and Facebook plugin (see screen shot at top).
Social media have been finding ways to converge and converse for some time now, and this plugin is another way your organization can invest its efforts on one platform, and have those efforts shared with constituents and donors over numerous other platforms. More bang for the buck!
