Having a fully functional commenting system for your WordPress site is imperative!

There are many reasons why this is a must but for now let’s focus mainly on building relationships with your audience by speaking to them via the comments. This will definitely help your reputation and will lead to more traffic and followers. Knowing how to handle positive and negative comments and how to respond to each of them is vital but this is a topic that will be discussed later on.

Let’s get back on the need for a fully functional commenting system.

WordPress has one which could be useful by tweaking it a little bit. But this solution could be complex and if you want your visitors to be able to share their opinion on your content as fast and as easy as possible then you will need another option. Starting from this post I will present to you several ways of integrating different comment solutions for WordPress as well as improving the default commenting system.

In this article I am going to explain to you how you can integrate Facebook comments for your WordPress website and why you would want to do this in the first place.

Actually let’s start with the latter. The main reason why you will want this is because you want your visitors to feel great when they are browsing your website. This means that if they want to comment something they should be able to do this instantly without any additional actions. And while most of them are logged in Facebook as they are searching for useful information on the web they will benefit of having the ability to comment directly using their own personal profile. Also the Comment box is similar in terms of design and functionality to the Facebook comments on the social media itself. Thus the visitors will be familiar with the functionality of the commenting system on your WordPress website and will feel comfortable using it. And what is more important – no additional registrations, no extra passwords to remember, no extra personal data to be submitted, etc. But wait there’s more – they will be notified of new comments in Facebook and they will be able to return to your website to re-join the conversation which will result in extra traffic for your website.

The next reason why you would integrate Facebook Comments in WordPress is because this commenting system will lead to virality for your content. Each visitor may choose to share their comment in Facebook as well and this will end up sharing your post/page as well.

We’re not done yet, friends! There’s more! Having Facebook Comments on WordPress will help your content also by increasing its credibility. Why? Because this reduces the fake comments to a minimum since most of the Facebook users will have their own profile picture and name set for their accounts and therefore everyone can see that the comment came from a real person.

OK, so currently we have the following reasons to choose Facebook Comments as a commenting system for WordPress: improved usability, extra social traffic, virality and credibility. What is missing? Ah, yes! SPAM! You don’t want spammy comments for your website, right? Then you have to take care of it somehow. The Facebook Comment system will do this for you since the administration of the social media is fighting with SPAM and fake accounts on a daily basis. So you will have one of the most SPAM-free commenting systems there is.

So with this I am more than sure that you are wondering how to integrate Facebook Comments in WordPress. So let’s focus on this.

There are many plugins that will do the trick for the task at hand. The problem is that many of them are not working correctly or might not fit into your theme design. Either way this is something that is not desired so I am not going to lie to you that the best way to integrate Facebook comments is by visiting the Facebook Developers page and generate the code for the social plugin by yourself. Then place this comment in the respective theme file so that i will show exactly where you want this to happen and voila – you are done!

However this may be hard for beginners that is why I am going to present a solution that I have tested on some of my websites and I know that it functions correctly. It is called Facebook Comments and it is a simple to use plugin. All you need is a Facebook app ID that you can easily create on the Facebook Apps page. Actually you will need this for all the solutions regarding Facebook comments that is why it is important. Now go through the app creation process fill in the necessary details and link the app to your website by choosing Website as the desired platform for the app and finally you will be presented with your app ID which you have to paste in the Facebook Comment plugin settings. Then choose the moderators for your comments. You may assign some of your friends as well.

Each comment on your WordPress website will result in a Facebook notification and this will allow you to easily moderate the comments. You may allow them as public, delete or hide them with ease. In the plugin’s setting you will find a link to the Facebook moderation tool for your app. Also this plugin provides a great set of options so that you can end up having a perfectly fit and functioning Facebook Commenting system for your website.

Finally I’d like to inform you that if you have entered your app ID in any other plugins and it is present in the Open Graph Protocol code you should not enter it once again for this plugin as it will lead to duplicate lines. So ignore the plugin’s error messages that you have not entered your app ID and proceed using it. It will work.

If you have any questions – feel free to ask in the comments below. Which is your favorite commenting system for WordPress?

See you again friends!