Facebook Authorship Easy Steps

Originally published on lotemdesign.com on July 1, 2015 By Sarit Lotem
Up until about a month ago, if you searched for a page on Facebook, the results would show a picture of the page’s creator. Remember? This was part of Google’s authorship. Why did they stop it a month ago? It’s because Google removed it. I wish I could tell you why but I’m honestly not sure myself.
The good news is (I will tell you why it’s good in a minute) that Facebook just rolled out it’s own authorship feature which means that if you share your articles on Facebook, your followers and friends will see your name under it and they will be able to follow you by clicking on your name.

As you can see below the preview, Facebook now added “by SARIT LOTEM” and people can hover on it for more info about me and they can click on it too to like my page. If the reader is not connected with you already, he or she will also see a second line that will ask them to read even more of your articles and to follow you.
So why is this so good?
Think about it. Every time you or your visitors will share your posts, those new features will show up. As a small business owner, one of the best ways to generate traffic to your website is by blogging and sharing your articles on social media platforms such as Facebook. Facebook’s new authorship feature is so powerful. It will help spread your articles and promote your business and brand much faster than before and it makes it much easier for people to follow you.
What is a follower on Facebook? For those of you who don’t know, it’s when someone “follows” your page with allows them to receive notifications whenever you post something without them having to “friend” you. If you are uncomfortable with this feature you can disable it in “Settings” or when you post something personal, you can easily specify to share it with your friends only.
Why is Facebook doing this? It’s simple. This way, you will spend more time on Facebook, reading more relevant posts, interacting with more people and of course, being exposed to more advertising.
So how do you set the Facebook authorship?
When I first found out about this, most of the guides I found instructed you to add a line of code in the header tag. I knew that this would make a lot of small business owners anxious and discouraged so I wrote the steps below to simplify the process for you:
1. On Facebook, go to Settings
2. Click on the Followers tab
3. Set Who Can Follow Me to Everybody
4. Copy your Facebook personal page URL (for example: https://www.facebook.com/sarit.lotem)
5. If you have a WordPress website and you use the Yoast plugin, hover over SEO on the left side bar (if you don’t use Yoast, it’s time to install it) and click on Social
6. Click on the Facebook tab
7. Check the Add Open Graph meta data box
8. Click on Users on the left side bar
9. Find your user profile, and then paste your Facebook profile URL in the appropriate field
If you have followed all of the directions and your author tag is not showing up on Facebook,
1. Try to clear your site cache or try to view it on a different computer.
2. The feature may not have rolled out for you yet. Try again in a couple of days.