Not every blog needs a facebook fan page. If you have a personal blog, then you can easily use your Facebook profile and the subscription feature to allow users to follow you on facebook. Similar to the like box, facebook offers a follow button for users to use on their websites. Recently, one of users asked us how to add a Facebook follow button in WordPress. In this article we will show you how to add a Facebook follow button for authors in WordPress.
For single author blogs, you can just get the code from Facebook Social plugins page and paste it in your templates or a widget. On the other hand sites with multiple authors have to take few more steps.
Video Tutorial
If you don’t like the video or need more instructions, then continue reading.
Adding Facebook Follow Button for a Single Author WordPress Blog
For a single author WordPress website, the simplest way to add a Facebook Follow button is by getting the code from Facebook Social Plugins website and pasting it into your WordPress theme template, widget, or a page.
Simply provide the Facebook profile URL of the user, and facebook will automatically generate a preview of the follow button on the right. Choose a layout and configure the appearance of the plugin, and then click the Get code button. Copy the code in <iframe> tab and paste it in a widget, post, or page.
Adding Facebook Follow Button on Multi-Author WordPress Blog
First thing you need to do is install and activate Facebook plugin. Upon activation the plugin adds a Facebook menu item in your WordPress admin sidebar. Clicking on it will take you to plugin’s General settings page. This page will ask you to provide application key and secret key.
How to create a Facebook Application for your Website
Go to Facebook Developers website and log in with your Facebook account. Next, click on Create New App button.
A small pop up would appear, and it will ask you to provide a name for your app. The other two fields in this form are optional.
Now you will land on a developer page for your app where you will see your App ID and APP Secret Key. You need to copy those keys and enter them into the Facebook plugin’s page on your WordPress website.
Adding the Facebook Follow Button
Go to Facebook » Follow Button menu option. The plugin settings are pretty intuitive. You would need to choose where you want the follow button to appear (posts, page, archives, home, etc.) and position (before or after posts, or both). Ideally, you would want to display author information on single posts. Depending on your theme, you can choose to display the Facebook follow button below the posts or before the post content. You can also choose the color scheme and content width. There are three layout available for the follow button (standard, button count, and box count). Choose the one that compliments your site’s layout and save changes.
Once the app setup is complete, each user must connect their Facebook account with the site. If you are the only author on your website, then go to Facebook » Social Publisher and click on the link Associate your WordPress account with a Facebook account.
Clicking on the link will open a pop-up window asking your permission to connect your WordPress website’s app and your Facebook account.
Other authors on your website can connect their accounts from Users » Profile page. Where they will see a link to connect their account.
Example Screenshot
Aside from the follow button, Facebook offers various other ways to integrate your website with Facebook such as: Facebook comments, Facebook Like button, Facebook Send Button etc.
We hope that this article helped you add a Facebook follow button for authors on your WordPress site. If you have any questions or suggestions, then please leave a comment below.
seems like a pretty easy set up process
Very nice information
I know this is an old post and I was able to do it for Twitter but Facebook now doesn’t have an iframe choice or any choice for that matter, so I am stuck. It’s 2015. I still need help.
Hello! I have a question, it no longer works but how do I do it?
Is there an easy way to get this follow button onto an individual author’s archive page?
I imagine you can use the same code from the Facebook, but I’m not certain how to inject each author’s Facebook profile URL unto the follow button code.
Thanks for any advice.
Appreciate the effort, but this doesn’t work as of October 1, 2013 – the date I tried it.
Which part is not working? It seems to be working fine. The demo is live on the FB site itself.
Its not working on my wordpress as well. The Iframe code does not save in the Text widget.
Any guidance would be welcome, thanks.
Sangeeta
Oct 26 2013
Sangeeta if your site is hosted on WordPress.com then iframe code will not work for you. Please see the difference between WordPress.com vs Self Hosted WordPress.org . If your site is not hosted on WordPress.com then you will get an error most probably because you did not select the width for your follow button. Enter a value in the width and the iframe code should work fine.
Thanks for this post. I’m having trouble getting a follow button for my FB page to show up in my wordpress posts. I want to have a simple follow button in my posts rather than a sidebar widget. Your post mentions that I can just paste the code into my theme template but I’m not sure where to do that.
Is there a way of doing this so that I don’t need to manually paste the code into every blog post? I’ve tried using a few plugins but they all seem to only create a sidebar widget or a “like” button in-post which only likes the post, not my FB page.
Any ideas?
Thanks for the tips. But it is extra load on our website. No wasting of time.
Thanks for the useful tut.
Is there a direct URL to follow a user? I would be more beneficial to simply swap out a URL, than re-code a section of my website to add a follow button.