Podcasters are always looking for easy ways to get a little more promotional juice online. Especially when it comes to things like social media accounts. Last week, Facebook announced its new Author Tag, which makes it easier than ever for users to find either your personal Facebook page or your brand page whenever your content is shared on the site.
Facebook’s new Author Tag is somewhat similar to Google’s discontinued Authorship system, which would provide some basic author information for items that would come up in Google searches. In Facebook’s case, anytime an item that’s properly using the Author Tag is shared, that post will include a link back to the author’s Facebook page along with either a “Follow” or “Like” button, depending on how the Author Tag is set up.
Implementing the Facebook Author Tag on your site isn’t terribly complicated. If you’re using WordPress, entering some information into the popular Yoast SEO plugin should do the trick. If you’re savvy with code, you can get the source thru Facebook’s portal for developers.
Facebook’s rollout of the new Author Tag has been somewhat slow. I scrolled thru my own news feed earlier today to try and find some instances of the feature in action. But I didn’t see any. I’m not sure if this is a Facebook issue or if it’s just that content producers haven’t yet implemented the tag . Regardless, it should only be a small investment of time to set up the Author Tag. And hopefully, Facebook will continue to support this new function much longer than Google did with its own Authorship system.