Most people are familiar with fan pages and the concept of “liking” them. If I visit your fan page and “like” your page, all my friends will see that Matt Likes [your page title].

What you may not know is that these same like buttons can be added to your blog or static website with the Facebook social plugin.

Setting them up for a blog so they appear automatically requires the creation of an application, but in this article, I’ll describe the manual way using the web based Facebook developers tool.

Its very simple. Go to: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like, enter in the exact url you want people to like, i.e a domain name or the full url for a post/page.

Next, choose either like or recommend for your button and click “get code.” Copy the iframe box and simple paste it into the html for your page.

That’s all there is to it and now every time a person visits your site, if they choose to do so, they can “like” your website or article and share it with their friends.