Facebook Social Plugin: “Serious Game Changer”?

Mark Zuckerberg and his team of ninjas over at Facebook have been so busy lately, I wonder when they sleep.

First, they did a major overhaul of our personal profiles, and a few months later, made the same changes to Pages, and added some really cool new functionality that will allow businesses with Facebook Pages to spread their brand far and wide across Facebook.

But there were still some glitches. The order of posts on pages seemed a bit… well… random. Supposedly, posts put up by the administrator were pushed higher than those not posted by admins, but no one seemed quite sure what the algorithm was. After quite a lot of outcry, Facebook changed it so that posts are now ordered chronologically (“Most Recent”) or you can choose the most popular posts on that page (“Top Posts”), the same as you can choose with your own Facebook stream.

Then, I was surfing around the other day, and I saw this:

Needless to say, I got pretty excited about that. Facebook has created a new a application called Facebook Social Plugin, which allows you to basically have most of Facebook’s functionality right on your website. Of course, we all know about the like button, but now you can actually comment on someone’s website, and it will show up back on your Facebook page.

This is a really new application: it just came out last week. Because I have a blog that has a comments section already enabled, I’m wondering if this is something I should have on my blog or not. People are not going to post comments twice: once to the FB comment box and once to my blog’s comments. I’m certainly willing to experiment and try, and I will certainly be watching with interest how this new technology affects our ability to market using Facebook.

In the mean time, if you want to add a comments box to your own self-hosted WordPress blog, check out the Facebook Comments for WordPress plugin. You’ll need to get a Facebook Developer ID, first.

For more information, check out this article on Tech Crunch