How to put Facebook on your Site

It's now easier than ever to share your website's content on Facebook, which could prove to be an excellent way of getting more visitor interaction on your site.

Facebook has released a whole set of social plugins that let you do some really cool stuff, in many cases just by adding a couple of lines of code to your site.

Here's what they say:

Experience the web with Facebook friends.

Social plugins let you see what your friends have liked, commented on or shared on sites across the web. All social plugins are extensions of Facebook and are specifically designed so none of your data is shared with the sites on which they appear.

We were one of the first companies to implement Facebook Connect when it was launched some time ago, but to be honest it was a bit of a nightmare to get working, and at the time, somewhat buggy on differerent browsers. But their widgets seem really simple to use so should be a lot of fun.

There are 8 principle social plugins; the ones we think most applicable to the largest range of sites are discussed below:

Like Button:

About the simplest of the Facebook Social Plugins is the Like Button - you can add it to your site, so your visitors can click on it to send a story back to their friend's news feeds saying "[name] likes [your website]".

Depending on what you ask people to "Like", and the code on your site, Facebook can in some cases link things up so that the User's main "Likes and Interests" section of their profile updates with your information. You'll also then have the ability to tell the user about any news/updates you have.

Recommendations:

The Recommendations plugin is kinda like showing people what's been most popular on your website. You can set it up with your website URL and a box on your website will show links to other pages of your site that Facebook users have liked or shared. 

If a visitor is logged into Facebook when they visit your site, then the Recommendations Box will show them things that their friends liked on your site.

Comments:

The Facebook Comments Box allows you to let your visitors comment on any piece of content on your website. The visitor can then share that piece of content from your site, on their wall or friends' news feeds.

Matt Kelly talk in San Fran.

We were lucky enough to listen to a talk by Facebook engineer Matt Kelly, in San Fransisco just before Facebook launched their new Graph API, and it was facinating to hear how the new API has been developed and the power and simplicity it's built upon.

Facebook - Social App Workshop July 2010 - Matt Kelly from heroku on Vimeo.

Read all about them on the Facebook developer site.