In the last blog post, I showed how easy it was to get started using our free version of Social Analytics+ – however the statistics that it tracked was very limited at that point.

Stats to Date

Heatmap

So now it’s time to “turn on” the social though, this means something as simple as adding Facebook Connect to my blog in order to let readers interact via their Facebook account with what I have written on my blog post. To do this I started searching for an existing “Facebook Connect” plugin, of which there are many so take a look around and read them to find one that suits you and what you want to do best. For me this was the “comment” area of my blog.

I decided on the plugin, “Facebook Comments for WordPress”

Plugin

Plugin Description

Install and Activate

So far so good and pretty easy. Next to so what to do after it’s been activated.

Settings

Settings and Configuration

From here I need to connect to Facebook and create an app, this will give me the ID and Secret I need for the plugin to function properly.

I won’t go into all the details of creating the Facebook app as they are pretty straightforward.

The rest of the settings are your own preferences, don’t forget to add the “JavaScript” options at the bottom then “update”.

To see it in action just head over to a post on your page and check the comment section.

Not logged in

I opted to show both the Facebook comments as well as the WordPress Comments since my blog has been up for awhile.

Logged In

Now of course I head to my “fanpage” inside of Facebook and there I can let everyone know they can now post with Facebook to the comments of entries.

Fanpage

Of course this is not all we have to do, now we need to modify the changes we made in the first blog to understand that we have a Facebook user ID involved for the “tracking pixel” and thus give us more accurate data and of course the “social” data involved as well. That is for the next blog though.