A Social Media Plugin to Add Links to Facebook

Add link to facebook screenshot, blogsitestudio.com

Always on the search for social media tools that make my promotional life easier, I tested a new Facebook-related WordPress plugin last week. Add Link to Facebook, version 1.142 by Marcel Bokhorst, automatically adds links to post on your Facebook wall, and it works!

Any plugin that interacts with another platform – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube – requires a certain amount of set up to make the plugin work between the sites, and sometimes that finagaling can be extruciating. Not with Add Link to Facebook.

The setup page for this WordPress plugin guides you to Facebook where you create an application for your page. Facebook gives you an App ID and App Secret which are entered on the Add Link to Facebook setup page. Hit Authorize and it will make the connection between your WordPress blog and your Facebook page. If it doesn’t, you need to go back and make sure everything was done right on the Facebook side. In the case of this site and Tasting Room Confidential, it connected immediately, unlike Publish to Facebook, which never worked right here.

The Add Link to Facebook control panel is housed in your Tools closet. Once authorized, it offers dozens of settings, unlike Publish to Facebook, which has only a few settings.

Some of the significant settings I changed are:

Picture: Set now to First Image in Post. At first I set it wrong, and it posted my logo. But what Add to Facebook does when you change the picture setting and update the blog post is it will update the Facebook post automatically. No deleting and re-posting. Just a quick update.

Appearance: I set the site title as caption, excerpt as message, and privacy to “all friends”

Comments: Here’s where things get interesting. Add to Facebook allows you to Integrate Comments from Facebook and to Copy Comments from Facebook to WordPress, which is cool because it irks me when people comment on Facebook and not on my blog. With these options checked, my Facebook friend comments appear in my site’s comment box.

However, Add to Facebook offers this warning:

“Please be aware that comment integration or showing Facebook messages in the widget could harm the privacy of other Facebook users!

Meaning your Facebook friends may not want the comments they thought private to become public knowledge on another social media site. I guess the decision to use this option depends on the context of the blog posts and how controversial they are. Also, it would depend on the privacy settings your friends know you keep on Facebook. Those might require a disclaimer warning Facebook friends that their comments will be posted on your blog.

Add to Facebook’s Comments options also integrates Likes from Facebook into your WordPress blog.

Like Button: This control allows you to set a Like or Recommend, in 3 different layouts, before or after the post.

Then, on the Edit Post page, Add Link to Facebook offers settings for Custom Excerpt, Custom Text, and Link Picture, just so you can tweek the post a little more.

There are many more options to set in Add Link to Facebook, but since its first audition on my blogs it has worked perfectly in Facebook. It also seems to have improved the appearance of my link preview in Hootsuite.

So if you are into social media, get Add Link to Facebook, try it out, and – as the author extols on the WordPress Plugin page – rate it. Out of 540,153 downloads, it has received only 724 ratings, averaging 4.75 stars. Not bad, but not good enough for this handy little social media plugin.

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