Facebook Authorship - A Boon For Bloggers

Are you one among those writing enthusiasts, who are highly concerned about the shutting down of Google Authorship feature? You now have the chance to continue your interest towards writing from WordPress to Facebook with the help of the new feature called as 'Facebook Authorship'. Interesting, isn't? Read on to learn more:

What is this feature all about?

The Facebook Authorship feature is something that works with a straightforward author meta tag and once it is setup, it will show up your profile link or page, when your content is shared. Earlier, in Google, there was just the display of the name of the author alone, but now the entire profile will be displayed like in the following image:

The image shows that the result is the linked name of the author along with any shares of the particular content on Facebook. This sort of display will allow viewers to see the author and if the content creates an interest, they will potentially follow the author through the 'follow' link given as in the following image:

How is this feature helpful to bloggers?

Authors looking for search engine optimization and are using WordPress or any other blogging platform can transfer their content from WordPress to Facebook easily with this great feature. Experts are of the opinion that this is going to be an extremely powerful way for bloggers to spread their personal brand, right alongside the content they create in WordPress and even other blogging platforms. Now, let us just focus on WordPress alone and not other platforms.

Whenever your content is shared to Facebook, regardless of whether you do the sharing or one of your readers do it, the share will have your name, even when your reader does not think about mentioning about you. It is not essential that you will have to link your WordPress content just to your profile, but it can also be linked to any other branded Facebook page.

How about the idea of following?

As shown in the image earlier, it will be possible for the viewers to follow you on Facebook from your content posted on WordPress.  But, the point to remember here is that Facebook has a strict limit of 5000 friends and the ability to follow any individual without his/her approving a friendship has been around for many years. If you are an individual, who do not feel comfortable with everyone seeing your post without your approval, the best thing you can do is not to create a personal brand on Facebook.

Even though, you are uncomfortable with this idea of many people seeing your post, I think, you will not deny the concept of being able to grow an audience of interested readers and fans on this social networking site. But, you might be wondering whether this will be possible without developing friendship with others and without using the Facebook Page? Yes, this is possible, by accepting followers as against additional friends. When you do this, you can retain the option of being able to share personal posts only with your friends. This will also help you from keeping private updates away from public followers. In Facebook, you have the wonderful option to decide whether you want to content to be viewed only by your friends alone or whether others can also view it. This can be done in the following way:

• Just visit the settings page of your Facebook Account
• Then, click on the followers tab
• Here, you can set, whom you wish to follow you

Here is the image showing this option of Facebook:

Here, one more point to remember is that you can also adjust, who can comment your posts and from whom you can get notifications.

How to Setup Facebook Authorship On WordPress?

Now, you might be wondering how to set up the Facebook Authorship feature on WordPress to get the authorship SEO benefits to both your Facebook Account and your WordPress Blog. Here is how to do it:

What you need?

To get this done, you need to have the following:

• You should of course have a self-hosted WordPress Website
• You should have installed the plugin called 'WordPress SEO by Yoast', you can get it here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/
• You should also have a Facebook Profile.

Here is the step-by-step you are looking for to achieve authorship SEO with this Facebook feature:

Step 1: Once you have downloaded and installed Yoast plugin, just visit the yoast settings page, choose social and then click 'Facebook'. Here, you will find a check box against the option 'Add open graph meta data', and enter your Facebook name with profile ID  and hit save. You must be wondering how to get Facebook Profile ID, don't worry just go through this post. After setting it up, this page will look like the image given below:

 

Step 2: Here, you will have to visit the users tab in WordPress and choose edit, wherein you can insert the URL of your personal Facebook profile or any other Facebook page that you wish to spread through SEO for WordPress. Then, click update profile. Here is the image showing the same:

 

Step 3: In this step, you will test if Facebook Authorship setup correctly and for the same you've to visit the Facebook debug page and then post the URL of the content that you wish to share from WordPress to Facebook, then click Debug, then Fetch new scrape information. Now, scroll down and you'll see the author tag as your Facebook profile link.

 

Conclusion:

Your SEO Authorship is going to find many followers for your WordPress post that can be connected to your Facebook Profile and let new people find and follow you on Facebook, if you wish to do so. What do you feel about this new feature from Facebook?

Images/ The Social Media Hat