How to Use a WordPress Facebook Plugin to Integrate Facebook With Your Website

Facebook has been a giant in the world of social media for some time now. It has yet to lose its influence and prominence, which means integrating it with your website is a must. Fortunately, doing so often comes down to installing a simple WordPress Facebook plugin (or two).

Linking your WordPress site and Facebook page together provides a number of benefits. For example, it helps you expand your reach by helping to ‘cross-pollinate’ both channels. What’s more, it lets you get additional use out of your content by re-posting it in more than one place.

Why it’s vital to integrate Facebook with your WordPress site

Facebook is now one of the older social media platforms (that’s still active anyway). Although it’s a part of the common vocabulary, marketers are sometimes tempted to ignore it in favor of newer, shinier options like Instagram and Snapchat.

While those platforms have a lot to offer, it’s not time to write off Facebook just yet. The social media giant still has a wide reach, and using it as a vehicle for marketing remains very effective. There are plenty of numbers to support those two points:

• As of September 2018, there are 2.27 billion monthly active users on Facebook (and 1.49 billion daily active users).
• 79% of Americans use Facebook, while only 32% use Instagram (the next most popular platform). The platform also has wide global reach, with a majority of users located outside the U.S. and Canada.
• 93% of marketers use Facebook as a regular part of their advertising campaigns, and 62% say it’s their “most important” social media platform.
• Ads on Facebook can have a high rate of return – 26% of users who clicked on ads in one study reported making a purchase (and the results in other research are similar).

The moral of the story is that creating and maintaining a Facebook brand page is crucial for nearly any business. However, if this is all you’re doing, you’re not taking full advantage of what the platform has to offer.

After all, most visitors to your website aren’t likely to stumble across your Facebook page unless you nudge them to do so. Similarly, the page will do you little good if it doesn’t lead people back to your website, where they can learn more about what you have to offer – and hopefully, convert into paid customers.

In other words, if you have both a Facebook page and a website (which you should!), integrating the two is key. This enables you to leverage your audience on each platform to send traffic to the other and gives interested leads on both sites somewhere to go next. Fortunately, if your site is built with WordPress this is an easy task – as long as you use the right WordPress Facebook plugin.

How to integrate Facebook with your WordPress site (3 key methods)

There are lots of ways to connect your Facebook page and WordPress site, and plenty of tools to help you. Often, all you’ll need is the right WordPress Facebook plugin. Let’s look at three ways to integrate these two vital platforms!

1. Add your Facebook feed to your website

This is one of the most popular methods of Facebook integration and for good reason. Displaying your Facebook feed on your WordPress site offers a number of benefits:

• You’ll be offering more content to your website’s visitors, and helping your site feel more engaging.
• Your visitors can click through to your Facebook page, in order to view its content and follow it.
• Recent activity in your feed demonstrates that your business is active (since most company sites change infrequently).

If you’re looking for a tool to help you accomplish this integration, you can’t go wrong with Custom Facebook Feed:

This WordPress Facebook plugin is both simple to use and highly flexible. It’s also free, which means you risk nothing by giving it a try. All you need to do is install it, then visit the new Facebook Feed tab in your dashboard:

Here, you can start out by connecting your Facebook account. First, enter your Page ID, which you can find at the end of your Facebook page’s URL. Then select the login button, and follow the prompts to get your access token:

After your account is set up, you can use the settings below to customize your feed:

You can determine what type of posts to show (and how many), tell the plugin how often to check for new posts, and even configure your location and time zone. When you’re done, don’t forget to save your changes to the page. Then, switch over to the Customize tab:

Here, you have a ton of options to tweak nearly every aspect of your feed. You can change its size and colors, choose exactly what elements to display, and much more. Most of the settings are self-explanatory, but you can also find information on how to configure them in the plugin’s documentation.

When you’re done, copy the provided shortcode ([custom-facebook-feed]) and paste it wherever you’d like your feed to display. This can be on a post or page, for example, or in your sidebar or footer. This is all you need to do to place a fully-functioning Facebook feed on your website!

2. Share your WordPress posts on Facebook

In the previous section, we looked at how to import your Facebook content into your WordPress site. Of course, you can also do the same thing in reverse. If you have a blog on your WordPress site, or otherwise publish new content regularly, sharing this content to your Facebook page is a smart move. It will:

• Let your Facebook audience know about new content right away.
• Make followers aware of your website, and encourage them to visit it.
• Enable you to reuse your WordPress content as Facebook posts, saving you a lot of time.

Once again, all you’ll need is the right WordPress Facebook plugin. In this case, we’d recommend our own Revive Old Posts:

This plugin lets you share both new and old WordPress posts to Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms. Plus, it’s just as simple to set up as the previous WordPress Facebook plugin in this list.

After installing and activating the plugin, you’ll find a new table in your dashboard labeled Revive Old Posts:

Select Add Account, and then click on the Facebook icon. This will prompt you to connect your Facebook account by entertaining your APP ID and APP SECRET. If you don’t know how to find these, there’s a handy guide in the plugin’s documentation to help you.

Once your page is connected, it will appear in the list under the Accounts tab. Then, you can switch over to General Settings to customize how your post sharing will work:

You can set how often posts will be shared, decide how old (or new) they should be, and even include or exclude certain types of posts.

If you connect more than one Facebook account (by upgrading to the premium version of the plugin), you can also use the Custom Schedule tab to set up different posting settings for each one. Then, the Post Format tab lets you configure how your posts will appear on Facebook.

This is all you need to do if you want to share your older content periodically on your Facebook page. If you have the premium version of the plugin, you can even share your new posts as soon as they’re published.

3. Add the Facebook pixel to your site

Last but not least, let’s look at an integration method that’s a little more out-of-the-box. While you’ve no doubt been using Facebook for some time, either personally or for business (or both), you may not be familiar yet with one of the platform’s more recent developments.

We’re referring to the Facebook pixel:

This handy tool is really just a small bit of code you can add to your website. It tracks visitor actions relating to your Facebook advertisements, something that can come in useful in a wide variety of ways. For example, you could track how many people are making purchases as a result of your Facebook ad campaigns.

What’s more, the Facebook pixel delivers key information back to the platform about who takes certain actions in regards to your ads. Then, this data is used to optimize the way your ads are delivered, in order to boost your conversions. Best of all, this process requires very little input from you.

Of course, the first thing you’ll need is to have Facebook advertising set up on your site. If you’re not sure how to do this, we have a complete guide to the process you may want to check out.

Normally, adding the Facebook pixel to your website is best done by a developer. However, the PixelYourSite Facebook plugin will manage the task for you effortlessly. It’s even compatible with WooCommerce and Easy Digital Downloads:

The process of setting up the plugin and tracking events is a little complex, but the developers of PixelYourSite have a set of comprehensive guides you can use to get started. Once the pixel is set up and active, you’ll be well on your way to driving new conversions via your Facebook ads.

Conclusion

Fortunately, there are many simple integrations you can achieve by using one WordPress Facebook plugin or another. As we’ve discussed, you can:

1. Display your Facebook content on your website, using Custom Facebook Feed.
2. Share your WordPress posts on Facebook, with the Revive Old Posts plugin.
3. Place Facebook ads on your site, and optimize them via PixelYourSite.

Do you have any questions about how to use a WordPress Facebook plugin we’ve introduced here? Let us know in the comments section below!

By John Hughes

John is a self-taught WordPress designer and developer. He has been working with the CMS for over a decade, and has experience operating as a freelancer and as part of an agency. He’s dabbled in everything from accessible design to website security. Plus, he has extensive knowledge of online business topics like affiliate marketing.