So what exactly is Facebook authorship? Basically it’s a new meta tag writers and publishers can use to show the author profile or publishing page for content posted on Facebook.
You can recognize this Facebook authorship markup on content found in your News Feed as there’s a linked name attached to it. This gives you the ability to potentially follow the author or page who created it.
This week’s #SocialMediaMinute will cover how to set up Facebook Authorship on your WordPress website.
Learn more by watching the short tutorial video below.
Video Tutorial
How to Add Facebook Authorship to WordPress
Now before you can set up Facebook authorship on your WordPress you’ll quickly need to modify your Facebook profile settings allowing you to be followed.
To do so, access your Facebook profile settings and locate the Followers option and make sure that it’s set to everyone.
Next access your WordPress dashboard and make sure that you’ve added your Facebook profile URL to your admin contact information section found within your user profile settings.
Now you’ll want to add the correct open graph meta tags to your website.
The best method I’ve found for this is to use the free WordPress SEO tool plugin by Yoast. If you’re familiar with WordPress you’ll know how to find and install new plugins.
Now all you need to do is navigate to the Social option within the plugin and select the Facebook tab and check the box that says “Add open graph meta data to your site” and save the changes.
Finally, you’ll want to confirm authorship has been established by using Facebook’s debugger tool.
Just copy and paste an existing post URL from your site to see.
If done correctly, the debugger tool will populate how your post will look and you’ll be able to recognize the authorship format.
If it doesn’t work the first time, keep refreshing the debugger search as it may take some time for Facebook to recognize the tag has been recently added.
Takeaway
We all leverage Facebook as a powerful way to distribute and amplify our published content. By adding Facebook open graph meta tags to your site and establishing Facebook authorship you’ll have the opportunity to gain valuable followers which could be seen as important when building your personal brand.
How do you feel about being able to be “followed” by the general public? Would it stop you from adding authorship? Can you see any other benefits of adding Facebook authorship to your site? Let me know in the comments below and make sure to come back next week for more social media tutorials.
