Facebook now lets you embed public posts in web pages

Facebook 6.1 for iOS (iPhone screenshot 004)

I’ve always liked embed codes. For someone who blogs for a living, being able to accentuate my writing with punchy YouTube videos, detailed Scribd documents, obnoxious Vine clips, pretty Instagrams, Twitter outbursts and other kinds of embeddable media more often than not makes a marked difference between mindless re-writes and stories that entertains readers while providing a deeper understanding of the topic at hand.

Twitter’s Vine and Facebook’s Instagram, for instance, have just recently begun supporting embed codes. Not to be outdone by (primarily) Twitter, the world’s dominant social network is now permitting users to inject whole statuses and photos into blog posts, web pages, instant messages and just about anywhere on the web…

Facebook today said it has started rolling out Embedded Posts. Only top publications like CNN, Huffington Post, Bleacher Report, PEOPLE and Mashable can embed Facebook content for now, with broader availability “coming soon”.

Of course, only public posts are embeddable.

The feature works just as you’d expect: simply hover over the audience selector on a public post (denoted by a globe icon) from Pages or Facebook users and choose ‘Embed Post’ in the drop-down menu.

Facebook Embedded Posts (image 003)

A dialog will pop up, offering an embed code. Simply copy and paste the code provided on your own web page – that’s all there is to it, really. On the downside, you can’t customize Embedded Posts. Worse, the size of the post is currently fixed to the same dimensions as it’s shown on Facebook, possibly messing up narrow blog designs.

Facebook Embedded Posts (image 004)

Signed-in users can easily like and share the post directly from the embed or click on a hashtag to discover similar content on Facebook, per the screenie below. I love that Embedded Posts show the number of likes, shares and comments – these give me an at-a-glance overview of their viralability.

Facebook Embedded Posts (image 001)

Embedded Posts can include pictures, videos, hashtags and other content. Longer posts get truncated, though your visitors can click ‘See More’ to expand the post. My only gripe is that Facebook won’t notify me if someone embedded one of my Public posts.

Facebook Embedded Posts (image 002)

Just like with embedded tweets, it may be easier to reference what brands or influential people are saying by embedding their Facebook posts rather than quote them directly.

On the downside, should the owner change the audience of an embedded post, a message saying the post is no longer available will display in place of the embedded post.

Embedded Posts require Facebook’s social plugin.

Those who run their own blog or a website can hop over to Facebook’s Developer Blog and check out the Embedded Posts documentation to learn more.

BTW, iDB has a Page on Facebook so like us if you haven’t already.