Heidi Burton - Making Strangers
Facebook has an array of widgets, buttons and badges for bloggers to play with, they are called Social Plugins. I love widgets especially when they help share my blog content to more people. If you look around this blog you will find one or two! Some of the facebook plugins are a little too advanced, but the ones I've shown here can be easily added to your blog by simply copying the iframe code snippet and pasting it into the right place.Once you land on the plugin page you will simply have to add the url of your blog or specific blog post and customise the widget (it really is a piece of cake). Facebook then provides you with the code to copy into your blog.
- To add a facebook widget to your Blogger side bar - Go to your blog dashboard and click on 'Design', then click add gadget in your desired location. Scroll through the optionsand click on " html/javascript " and simpy paste in the code snippet of your desired widget and save.It always sends your new widget to the top so drag the widget to the right place and remember to click save. (read this post if you need more places to add widgets)
- To add a facebook widget into to a Post - Open up the post (new or edit) and click on the Edit Html tab. Paste the snippet into the desired location. You can use the preview button to double check it's working ok before publishing. This is the same method for embedding a youtube clip or any 'code snippets' you come across.
Like Button Facebook Widget
It's really simple to add to a side bar or to a post, you just have to paste in a snippet of code. People can quickly click like and share your blog link back to their facebook profile. This is good as the link appears in the users facebook friends stream and perhaps more importantly it creates a backlink to your site which is great for search engine optimisation (SEO). I have also found that when searching on facebook, if lots of people have liked a page it shows a direct link to your blog.
Activity Stream Facebook Widget
The activity stream is a really useful way of showing your most popular posts. You can add the 'like button' to any post as described above and all the activity will be displayed here. It also displays 'shares', when people use the share icons on your posts. These share icons now come as standard with a blogger blog, you just need to switch them on (share buttons on blogger). You can also use add this like I do on CBuk to give people even more options. You can customise this widget, taking away the header, changing the border colour.
Let me know how you get on and please click like on CBuk before you leave!
Let me know how you get on and please click like on CBuk before you leave!
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