Written by ContentPowered.com
WordPress is great for making a blog. Facebook is great for social media marketing. Combined, they give you nearly infinite power. Okay, well, they don’t actually give you anywhere near that much power, but they have a lot of benefits for marketing, which you already know because you’re here looking for plugins to make them play nice together.
There are a bunch of different sorts of features you can add to WordPress for some Facebook integration. I’ve listed everything from feed displays and social buttons to login integration and photo syncs. There will be a lot of overlap between many of these plugins, so keep that in mind when you’re picking what you want; you don’t need three different Facebook comments plugins, and in fact trying to implement them all will cause conflicts and probably break all of them.
Feed Plugins
These plugins all give you some sort of Facebook feed integration. Essentially, you get some kind of sidebar box widget that displays the most recent handful of posts you’ve made on your Facebook page. How they’re displayed and how customizable they are depends on the plugin.
Custom Facebook Feed – This plugin is developed by Smash Balloon and has been regularly updated since release. With over 100,000 active installations, it’s one of the best plugins on this list. It gives you a Facebook feed box on your website that is completely customizable, so you can make it look just like the rest of your site and theme. It’s crawlable by Google, and it’s responsive, so it works on mobile as well. It even caches posts so it loads extremely quickly.
IK Facebook – This is an alternative to the Smash Balloon feed. It doesn’t have a lot that the above plugin doesn’t, but it’s a great alternative if you can’t get the primary option to work. For one thing, it’s simpler to configure and install. For another, it allows you to add a photo gallery pulling from your Facebook albums. It also has a unique feature that pulls upcoming events and creates a calendar to display on your site.
JSL3 Facebook Wall Feed – This is a fork of the popular Facebook Wall Feed for WordPress by Fedil Grogan. It has a few useful changes and, its primary selling point, includes a German translation. It’s one of the few focused international plugins available for a wall feed box.
Recent Facebook Posts – This plugin uses shortcodes to add Facebook post functions to your WordPress blog. It specifically renders your posts in plain HTML, for fast loading and search engine visibility. Caching is obvious. It also includes several language packs, including Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.
Facebook Social Stream – Possibly the simplest and easiest to install and configure plugin for this purpose, this is one of the few social stream feed displays that doesn’t require CSS knowledge to customize. It also makes sure to configure hashtags into links, if that’s an important selling point for you.
My Extreme Facebook – Though it claims it is extreme, there’s really nothing overly extreme about it. It has a few simple configuration options, but its primary benefit is that it’s very lightweight. It does include preconfigured themes for your use, though.
General Social Plugins
These are more general social plugins that include Facebook in their roster. Some of them have sharing buttons, some of them have more advanced features, but they all include something that pulls them out of the rest of the more specific categories in this post.
Yes, there are a lot more robust and popular plugins out there. The reason the big names aren’t included here is two-fold. First, they aren’t listed in the WordPress plugin directory. Second, they’re often paid plugins, and I’m specifically shooting for a list of plugins you can use on your site for free.
Feed them Social – This is an interesting social feed plugin because it allows you to create a custom social feed for people other than yourself. You don’t need to hook into your own page in order to run it. Rather, you’re able to aggregate feeds from anyone who has a page visible to the public, from friends and family to celebrities.
Mobile Sharing Toolbar – This is a toolbar of social sharing buttons, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others. It’s not a deep or highly customizable social bar, but it’s specifically designed for mobile, floating at the end of each post. This makes it easy for users to share any post they want, instantly.
Facebook Master – This is a robust Facebook widget that includes all sorts of additional tools, ranging from like and sharing buttons to customizable headers and app IDs. Plus, of course, mobile and responsive compatibility. There are actually half a dozen different versions of this plugin, ranging from simple to complex and fully featured.
NextGEN Facebook – This plugin gives you control on your WordPress blog for all of the HTML meta descriptors necessary to control social posts. It includes the open graph attributes and equivalents for Facebook, Google, Pinterest, Twitter, and any other site you can think of. If a site can show a link preview and can customize that preview, this shows you how.
Hupso Share Buttons – If you’re familiar with social sharing buttons, you know there are dozens of plugins out there in wide use. That’s one reason I like this plugin. Sure, it has 50,000+ active installs, but that’s nothing in comparison to some of the more popular versions out there. With this one, you’re able to have a unique-looking social sharing layout without worrying about the plugin disappearing or failing to be supported.
Facebook All – This isn’t really one plugin so much as it is a collection of useful Facebook plugin features. It includes analytics, compatibility with WooCommerce, login functionality, the follow/share/send buttons, social sharing buttons, embedded posts and a whole lot more.
Mashshare – In contrast to Hupso, this plugin is for when you really want a fast, reliable social sharing plugin and don’t care that one of the most popular sites – Mashable – uses it. This is a plugin designed and modeled directly after the social sharing buttons Mashable uses on their site.
Comments Plugins
There’s an official Facebook comments plugin that allows you to use Facebook comments instead of regular blog comments, Disqus, or another system. It’s rather limited, though, so these plugins give you additional customization options or SEO benefits.
Facebook Comments WordPress – This is an extension of the basic Facebook comments plugin with enhanced customization options. You can change the fonts, sizes, colors, and text for every part of the comments to suit your site design. Make Facebook look like something other than Facebook!
TG Facebook Comments – This is an interesting version of the Facebook comments idea. Rather than taking the Facebook comments plugin that Facebook provides and tweaking it, this takes WordPress default comments and integrates Facebook login functionality. It’s sort of a re-engineering of the concept, but it works quite well and is very interesting.
Facebook Comments by Vivacity – This is one of the simpler versions of the Facebook comments system. It allows you some customization options, along with the ability to choose between two color schemes, the choice between HTML5 or XFBML, and moderation options.
Facebook Comments Importer – This is another way of including Facebook comments, only this time it doesn’t require you to use Facebook’s plugin at all. Rather, you hook into your Facebook account and then, when a comment is posted, it is imported into your WordPress comments. It’s integration without requiring users use Facebook to comment on your site alone.
Like Boxes and Assorted Widgets
These plugins give you an assortment of different functions and widgets for Facebook on your blog. Most of them are simple like box integration, but some of them are a little more unique.
Why would you use any of these over the Facebook like box they provide in their marketing tools? That’s for you to decide. I like these plugins because they allow you to customize the look and feel of the like box beyond the basic “light” or “dark” color schemes Facebook provides, which pretty much never mesh with a site design the way you want them to. That’s just my reasoning though; you’re free to determine your own.
Easy Facebook Like Box – This is a typical, standard Facebook light box with a few additional features tacked on. You can include responsive design, you can set fixed dimensions, you can support different locations, and you can make it include a pop-up if you like. You can even have it hide for mobile users if you find it has a negative effect on their experience.
WS Facebook Like Box – This is a simple, easy version of the like box designed to help installation by using some very simple short code. You practically don’t even need to download the plugin, it’s so easy to use.
Facebook Page Plugin (Likebox) – This is a like box with some additional options for displaying specifically within posts or pages, or including in the sidebar or widget area of your blog. It’s simple, it’s functional, and it’s up to date.
Facebook Album – This plugin hooks into your Facebook page and reads the photos you have posted. It then generates a photo album box that you can embed in your blog. This allows readers to browse through your images and, if they desire, go to Facebook to comment on them.
Srizon Facebook Album – This is an alternative to the previous plugin, with the added ability to pull entire galleries or just specific albums. The downside is that the free version of the plugin is limited to 25 images in an album, and you need to buy the pro version to gain additional features and images. On the plus side, the pro version is just $15.
Facebook Tabs – This is an enhanced version of the typical Facebook like box functionality. Rather than just a like box, it has additional tabs, one of which displays friends of your page, and the other displaying an activity feed. You can customize which is the default tab, and you can customize the look to fit with your blog.
Facebook Login – This is one of the simplest ways to create a user login to hide content on your blog. It’s not simple to set up, unfortunately, but once you have it running it couldn’t be easier to maintain and use. You’re essentially creating members-only content and requiring a Facebook account to log in.
WPBatch Facebook Like Box – An incredibly simple and easy like box for WordPress. Set it up, customize it, and forget it. Use this if you don’t care about enhanced functionality and just want a basic light box with as little code as possible. Seriously, it’s only 3kb in size; you can’t find anything smaller than that with as much functionality. It’s almost confusing how they got it all to work.
Marketing Tools
These plugins are more specifically valuable to use for marketing and have features you won’t find anywhere else. For the most part they don’t overlap, but they’re also very narrow in scope; you’ll know if you want one, and if you do, you won’t have many options other than the one I’ve listed.
Facebook Auto Publish – This is an automatic poster that takes your new blog posts and creates Facebook posts about them, publishes those posts, and allows you to promote them however you like. It can include a simple message, wildcard variables, and a host of other configuration options.
WP Facebook Open Graph Protocol – This plugin adds complete customization options to control how links to your blog posts appear on Facebook. That preview that generates when you paste in a link? Every bit of that information is customizable and controllable with this plugin.
Facebook Open Graph Tags – This is a variation on the previous plugin, only it includes both Google+ customization options and Twitter card tags on top of the Facebook tags. It’s not as robust as one of the more general social plugins above, but it serves the purpose admirably.
WooCommerce Shop to Facebook – This helps you integrate WooCommerce, StoreYa, and Facebook into your WordPress blog. You can do a lot, too much to list here, but just imagine getting all of those systems to work comfortably together. That’s what you’re getting with this plugin. You get additional group deal features as well, along with gimmick deals like scratch and win cards and tabs for other social media sites.
Facebook Page Promoter Lightbox – This is like one of those exit intent pop-ups except, rather than customizing your message or giving you a pre-determined call to action, it displays your Facebook page like box. Think of it as an alternative to a mailing list CTA; you can lightbox your Facebook page to get people to follow you.
Upload Photo to Facebook – This is a complex plugin with a very simple feature; it allows you to upload a picture through your WordPress dashboard and have it appear on your Facebook page. It does require a web server hosting your WordPress installation that supports Curl, though, so make sure you have that if you want to use this plugin.
