Organising WordPress For Facebook

As is often the case one of our clients asks us a question about how they can do something on their site, and we pull together our collective wisdom to provide and answer.  However, despite our constant attempts to understand the entire universe, we can sometimes fall a little short in this desire.  Recently we were asked to make a WordPress site a little more ‘friendly’ to FaceBook, so our research began.

The features that we desired was to add a like button to each blog entry, and to ensure that the site image that is displayed on Facebook when submitting the website URL was a particular image, not the selection that were scraped directly from the site.

Initially we had a look around to determine the nature of the image scraping and we found some useful information at the following links:

Stackoverflow – Facebook Post Link Image

eHow – How to Get Your Website Preview Thumbnail to Show Up on Facebook Share

And this led to the use of the link rel=”image_src” href=”image.jpg” tag in the header to define the desired image.  Also referenced was Open Graph Protocol which appear to be a set of tags defined in a header of a site to provide information specifically to the social media set of sites.

Having done this limited set of research on the topic we looked in the WordPress plugins, and discovered Like-Button-Plugin-For-Wordpress, and this plugin allows for simple addition of the like button and the addition of a desired image, that will be pulled when the site is linked to.

Visiting the plugin page stated above it is possible to get instruction as to the use of the WordPress plugin, and the feature set available.  This is very comprehensive and while it is still early days in it’s use, we are very pleased with what appears to be on offer.

Have you used this plugin?  How do you find it?