How to Embed Facebook Video in WordPress – Beginner’s Guide
Facebook has distinguished itself as the leading social media platform. With a concurrent active user count rivaling the population of the largest countries in the world, Facebook is the web platform with the most budding viewer potential, one that every blog/marketer/entrepreneur should capitalize on.
WordPress website owners should always keep in mind to make sure to upload videos on third party websites and embed it on their posts instead. This is because storage space on your website might be limited but it is not so for many third-party websites.
Facebook also provides social networking features such as likes, comments and sharing alongside its video/photo upload features. So let’s take a look at the reasons why we should consider using these features and maximize on them.
Why should we use Facebook video?
Facebook’s video service is perhaps not the best third-party video service on the planet. It doesn’t have the quality or the ingenuity of YouTube, nor the strong live streaming features of Twitch or Instagram. The quality of facebook videos aren’t comparable to that of other platforms and it doesn’t have the best archiving features either nor intuitive playlists features.
However what Facebook does have is an absurd market and huge potential for helping your content go viral. Facebook’s user count is the largest account size in the world. Simply put, a bigger population means more viewers.
And since Facebook is at its core, a social media, the immense sharing features, content like/commenting and inter-linking allow your content to spread around the website at an immense rate.
Not only that, you can use your Facebook page or profile as a secondary platform as well to ensure that your videos or vlogs are not only enjoyed by people on your website but also by others on Facebook itself. This also means that you can embed and link videos of others that you believe your readers might enjoy ( with permission, of course.)
So in order to make use of this amazing platform, let’s take a look at how we can our embed Facebook video in WordPress.
There are four major ways to embedding Facebook videos on WordPress:
- Directly inserting the video
- Directly embedding using IFrames
- Embedding Using Facebook’s Video Embed API
- Embedding Using Plugins
1) Directly inserting the video
One of the easiest ways would be to directly place a video onto the Visual editor while editing/creating a post.
For this, just copy the URL of a Facebook video by right-clicking a video and choosing the ‘Show Video URL’ option. Copy this URL and simply copy this onto the visual editor of any post and this should embed the video onto the post.
2) Directly Embedding using IFrames
Facebook also provides an option to embed a video in the form of iFrames as well.
To receive a video’s embed code, simply click on the Ellipsis/More options button after selecting a video and click on Embed. An iframe code will be provided to you that you can insert into any part of your website.
For demonstration, we will place it on any post of ours. Instead of using the visual editor like above, we need to use the text editor here.
We need to directly insert the code at any required point so that the video can embed onto our page.
Once you save the post, your video should be displayed accordingly.
3) Embedding Using Facebook’s Video Embed API
An extremely useful service for Facebook is that it has its own API for embedding its video player. This allows you to easily insert various types on various locations all over your website. This means your videos can be placed outside posts. This includes sidebars, footers, and widgets as well.
The method requires a 2-step process.
Enabling the API
For this, simply open this link to access the tool.
[Note: Alternatively, you can use the More options section to select the embed code and then click on advanced options to be directed to the page directly. Doing so removes the next step where we copy the video’s URL onto the tool.]
Now, once we open the tool’s page, simply direct to the Embedded Video Player configuration section.
Then copy the video’s URL into the URL of the video field.
Then select the required pixel width of the video (this defines the size of the video window) and then click on the Get code button.
The tool should provide you with a set of two codes. The first one is a Javascript SDK that we place onto our theme files in order to insert our facebook video. The second is the snippet code of the video itself. You need to save both of these for now so we can use it later again.
First, we need to enable the plugin/API on our website. For this, open the header.php theme file.
For this, hover over Appearance on the dashboard sidebar and click on Editor. Then on the Theme Files sidebar section on the right, click on Theme Header (header.php) file.
Take the first part of the code we were provided with and place it below the <Body> part on this file. After copying, click on the Update file button to save the file modifications. By inserting this Javascript SDK, we’ve enabled the Facebook video player all over our website.
Inserting the video
Now we can insert the video into any part of the website. Simply copy the 2nd code we received onto any required point.
From widgets to posts, you can insert a Facebook video onto them all using this method.
These are the native ways of inserting of embedding Facebook videos on your WordPress website but we have another alternative process explained as well.
4) Embedding Using Plugins
You can also use a dedicated plugin to insert Facebook videos into your website. This method is arguably the easiest and the most beginner-friendly.
There are many plugins available on the web that provide you these services for free. A couple of them which we can recommend are:
AE FB Video Embed:
AE FB Video embed is one of the easiest to use plugins when it comes to embedding Facebook videos. No need to setup anything, you can simply use its shortcode or use its insert shortcode button and Ui to instantly embed videos. The plugin also lets you add other parameters to your videos such as fullscreen mode, autoplay, captions and more.
Wp Embed Facebook:
Wp-Embed is much more feature heavy and rather than just embedding videos, it supports albums, photos, live videos, events and more. You can easily customize the embeds as well as enable HTML5 video. Furthermore, you can insert multiple call to action buttons on your content such as send a message on Facebook, page like box and more.
Using the plugins:
Most of these plugins use shortcodes to embed videos. They also support live videos and provide parameters for you to edit.
The working process of most of these plugins are the same so we will be using Ae FB Video embed plugin for our demonstration. The process involves simply inserting the shortcode [ae-fb-embed url= ‘ ‘] to insert videos.
First of all go ahead and install the plugin first. If you are not aware of the steps involved to do so, consider reading this article.
Then, once you activate the plugin, you can insert the shortcode
[ae-fb-embed url= ‘______________’]
where you need to embed your video. Here you insert your video’s URL inside the blank space given.
Furthermore, for your posts, you can use the AE FB video embed button to instantly embed your facebook videos onto the posts. The button also provides you other parameters to edit your video such as Video size, Allow/Disable fullscreen, captions, Autoplay and more.
Once you insert your video URL and modify the parameters accordingly, click on Insert shortcode to Editor to embed the video onto the current location of your Text cursor.
Alternatively, you can copy the shortcode given and paste it wherever you want.
If you followed the steps correctly, your video should be displayed properly like this:
Concluding:
Thus you can use one of these 4 methods to easily embed your Facebook videos onto WordPress. Integrating your website with Social media is a huge advantage in the current competitive world and Facebook videos give you the advantage of both social media and external video uploads.
Furthermore, you can also improve various other social media related elements and other impressionable factors on your website using these following articles:
- How to add a Facebook page like-box to WordPress
- Adding Instagram to WordPress
- How to display Weather Forecast n WordPress
