If you regularly embed Twitter posts to your blog or website to highlight a customer comment or for any number of reason, now you can do the same with Facebook.
Introducing the continued roll out of Facebook embedded posts on the official Facebook developers blog, Facebook software engineer Dave Capra explained on Wednesday:
We introduced Embedded Posts in July to make it easy for publishers to add any public post from Facebook to their blog or web site. Today, we’re excited to make Embedded Posts available to everyone. We’ve also added several enhancements based on feedback from our launch partners.
Installing Facebook posts is easy. Simply hover your cursor over the arrow in the upper right hand corner of the post you want on Facebook. Then select the embed option.
Basic Features of Facebook Embedded Posts
It’s inevitable that the new feature will be compared to the embed tweet function on Twitter. However, there are some interesting differences.
First, video players in the Facebook posts will play on your site as well, once you’ve embedded the post. It’s a nifty option if you want to add things like customer testimonials shared on Facebook to your main site.
Second, you can access the embed code right from the post on your blog or website. Do this by using the pull down next to the “Like Page” or “Follow” button on the new embedded post. This could be a way of giving your posts more shelf-life, since readers would have another place to find and share them besides your Facebook feed.
Third, there’s a special size to accommodate the smaller screen of a mobile device, very important with increased smartphone and tablet use these days.
There’s even a special plugin to help WordPress publishers use the embed feature more easily.
Genius move by Facebook to get further embedded (pun intended) into the day to day web experience of publishers. This makes repurposing content across platforms that much easier.
Anita Campbell
Hi Robert, my thoughts exactly.
One of the complaints against Facebook is that it’s too much of a walled garden. Search engines can’t even index a lot of the activity that goes on there (that may be good in the case of those drunken frat party pictures, but for a business that’s generally bad). You can spend a lot of time over there and not necessarily do much for your own home on the Web, if you’re not careful.
This is a step in the right direction.
Love the pun. 🙂
– Anita
Aira Bongco
This is great. My only concern is this has the tendency to get abused. Once you have an army of people scraping content from Facebook posts just to get unique content, you also get lots of sites that does not mean anything. Well, that’s the dilemma of every technological advancement. It is always bound to get abused.
I am sure that they had a valid reason on why they didn’t do this years ago. I just used an embedded post on my site and it works flawlessly.
This is a good move, similar to the hastags. Better to be late then never. But I am not sure it has been rolled out yet as I cannot see it. Does the new plugin post automatically to your time line. In fact, there are many ways to do that without using a plugin. Last thing you need is another plugin.
This new feature simply allows your blog to become a portal to Facebook or an extension of Facebook. By embedding a post from your fanpage or group to your blog (as a post) will simply show your readers how others are reacting to the same when shared in groups or fanpages. This drives your blog readers to check them and get more engaging by liking, voting, commenting and sometimes even sharing your content on their timeline or with friends.
Stephanie Vega
I love this feature in theory – haven’t actually implemented it yet because I want to hear other webmasters share their experiences with it.