Want your customers to be able to share your products or information/landing pages via Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or Google+? You can do this via the social media management tool built in to your website. You do not need an account with any third party to do this, but you will need to set up a special authentication key for Facebook if you want to use the Facebook like, share or comment tools.
Here is how to set it all up. Note that if you just want to display a link to your social media accounts and not have sharing buttons on your pages, then you can set up social links in the basic store setup.
Firstly decide on what buttons you want to have displayed. You can choose Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest or Google+.
All of the options for the social media features can be found in your administration panel under their own page called Social media, found in the Marketing section. In your admin panel, open this section up.
This opens up the screen where you can select the social media buttons that you want to have displayed, and their properties. Facebook requires a special key to be set up specific to your account. Twitter, Pinterest, and Google+ do not.
To choose or edit any of the social media options available, just click the pencil beside the relevant social media option. Then complete the settings on the screen that appears. Pinterest, Twitter and Google+ are relatively straight forward - there are more complicated settings for Facebook so this is shown separately below.
To choose or edit any of the social media options available, just click the pencil beside the relevant social media option. Then complete the settings on the screen that appears. Pinterest, Twitter and Google+ are relatively straight forward - there are more complicated settings for Facebook so this is shown separately below.
To use the Facebook tools, you first need an 'app ID' from Facebook. This is a special key code that identifies your site and account on Facebook's platform. It is specific to your account and the URL of your store. It can't be used on other websites - you set up a new app ID for each site you set up. If you have set up the Facebook store, then you will already have done this step - use the same App ID. If not, see our separate knowledge base article with instructions on how to set up an app ID for Facebook.
Once you have your Facebook App ID, click in to the Facebook editing screen to edit the Facebook settings.
Once you have your Facebook App ID, click in to the Facebook editing screen to edit the Facebook settings.
To prevent errors in your site when you receive it, by default Facebook shares are turned off with just Tweet and Pin as default live options. You need to enter the App ID for Facebook into the box and mark Facebook as Yes if you wish the button to show up with social sharing links.
Here is what the various settings on the page are for:
Here is what the various settings on the page are for:
- Facebook Page URL - this is the URL of your Facebook page - the page that will be liked when the 'Like' button is clicked.
- Include Send button - in addition to the like button, Facebook have Share and Send button options as well. The send button lets you tell a friend about the page, via your Facebook account (instead of sending an email). As this goes through Facebook and not email, the recommendation message won't get caught up in email program spam filters.
- Display profile photos - if you choose the "Standard" button type, you can ask Facebook to show profile thumbnails of the people who have liked your page.
- Show Share button - in addition to the like button Facebook have Share and Send button options as well. The share button lets a visitor share your page on their Facebook account
- Width of Like section (px) - this sets the screen width of the 'Like' section in your site.
- Button layout - choose how you would like your button to appear. Standard just shows the word like, whereas the other options allow you to show the count of the number of people who have liked the account or page (e.g. 2K people have liked this page).
- Like or Recommend - what wording would you prefer on your button? Facebook lets you choose between Like or Recommend.
- Colour scheme - Facebook allows the website to indicate to it whether light or dark text is used for any text outside of the Like button
- Facebook comments on products - control whether Facebook comments are enabled. Choose "Allow comments" to have these used, or "Off" to not use Facebook comments at all.
- Display on - control whether the Facebook like button is shown on on Product Pages, Product and Information Pages, Both types of pages or Neither.
- Number of comments - if you are using Facebook comments this lets you display how many previous comments are shown in the list at a time
- Width of comments box - this gives you the width of the comments box. Enter a fixed width, or to have the box vary by the size of the screen, use a percentage.
- Log in with Facebook - if "Yes", then a button will appear on the customer login page and on the checkout page that enables your visitors to log in using Facebook. If "No", the button does not appear.
