The New Recommendations Bar
Earlier this week, Facebook announced a new recommendation bar. There’s been a recommendations box around for a while now. The bar is different…
You’ll see the new Facebook “bar” pop up in a little while down on the right corner.
At the moment it’s a nice, unintrusive like button.
As you scroll down the article, the bar will spring into life and recommend a couple of articles based on what your friends like. Unlike the old box, the bar allows people to share the article they are reading by clicking the like button.
The idea is to increase time on site and increase likes – both of which are good for (dare I say it) SEO.
The developers say that in early tests, websites are getting 3x times the click through on the stories it recommends than through the Recommendations Box.
I never used the recommendations box because it seemed to be incredibly slow loading. The recommendations bar seems to be running ok for the moment, so we’ll give it a go.
How To Install The Facebook Recommendations Bar
There’s two ways you can install the bar if you are using WordPress.
The first way is the same as everyone else. Pop over to the developers site and generate your code.
You need to scroll part way down the page until you see the box.
If you leave the URL of the article and Domain boxes blank, it will default to the article you are reading and the domain you are on.
The trigger “onvisible” is set as default, this means the bar will pop up once your reader has scrolled down to where you have inserted the code.
You can also choose a percentage of page scrolled or manual settings.
Click the get code, to get your code…
You need an app ID (create an app), I’m using an existing app ID for my blog. There’s more about creating an app in the video below.
Copy the top script and paste just below the <body> tag on your webpage code. If you are using WordPress with a theme that allows you to add header scripts, it seems to work perfectly fine pasting into there. Dont forget to add your app ID.
Copy and paste the second part where you want your plugin to appear – mine is in a text box in my sidebar.
Facebook Recommendations Bar For WordPress
Remember the official Facebook plugin for WordPress (that I was deeply unimpressed with…), well now it does something useful. There’s no need to copy and paste any code.
Simply go to the plugins settings, tick the recommendations box, and change the settings to your personal choice.
If you haven’t installed the official Facebook plugin yet, here’s a video showing you how to do it.
Over to you…
Will you be using the new Facebook recommendations bar? Try it out now, click that like button, you know you want to!
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It all just gives me the shudders, having just launched our site an getting to grips with aweber and auto responders, planning email campaigns, working out how to format sales pages etc etc this is one more thing that will have to marinate until the time is right, but glad I know what it is now, Thank you
Hi Shivie, it’s all a learning curve isn’t it! I love the look of your site and love your blog posts too – just not Facebook comments *shudders* Thanks for popping in and your comment, I appreciate it