It’s Facebook Friday — each week we’ll offer one tip for leveraging Facebook to increase customer awareness of and engagement with your brand or business. This week we’ll show you how to install Facebook’s new WordPress plugin on your self-hosted WordPress blog.

We’ve talked again and again about why businesses should have a multi-platform approach to social media marketing. That is, they should be on every social media platform possible, and cross-promote between them whenever they can.

Hopefully you’ve heeded our advice and you have both a Facebook Page and a company blog! If that blog runs WordPress — not a bad choice, given that it’s one of the most powerful options available to businesses — then this plugin will be handy.

Among other things, the plugin allows you to automatically post all new WordPress blog posts or pages to your Facebook Page’s Timeline, integrate Facebook comments into your blog’s comments, place Like, send, or subscribe buttons on your page, and “mention” Facebook Pages in your posts.

Add the Plugin in the WordPress Dashboard

The first step is to log into your WordPress dashboard (the same one you use to compose new posts) and look in the left panel for the “Plugins” menu option. Navigate your mouse to that button and select the “Add New” sub-option.

That takes you to a page where you can browse, search, or upload new plugins for your blog. Assuming you don’t have prohibitive server security settings, the easiest way to do this is the “search” method, not the upload one, so we’ll cover that.

Just type “Facebook” in the search field and click the “Search Plugins” button; Facebook should be the first result in the page that appears after your click. Click the small text link to “Install Now” and confirm to install the plugin. It should be installed within seconds.

You’ll still have to activate it, though; you can do that in the install completion page that appears by clicking on “Activate Plugin.”

How to Configure the Facebook Plugin

You’ll realize immediately that you can’t use the plugin without first configuring it. A message should appear at the top of the screen that says, “You must configure the plugin to enable Facebook for WordPress,” along with a link. You can just click that link to get started.

If the message doesn’t appear, just click look at your left-hand dashboard menu; there should not be a “Facebook” option towards the bottom. Click it!

Follow the on-screen instructions to create a Facebook app for your Page on Facebook’s own website, then fetch the App ID, secret, and namespace from the app and input them here. Click Save Changes and you’re ready to start using the features the plugin offers!

Was this tip helpful? Do you have any more ideas for getting the most out of Facebook? Let us know in the comments!

[Image credit: Evan Hahn]