WordPress, one of the premier blogging platforms, is ideally suited for users who want to be at the digital helm of their own website. The platform offers a lot more control for novice bloggers and small business owners.

As WordPress has grown, so has its devout following – all of whom have benefited from the strong online community that continues to provide free (or very fairly priced) themes and plugins. WordPress now is a formidable beast raising the benchmark for competitors. While it’s not perfect, it’s getting close. Just about anyone can use it with a little bit of virtual monkey wrenching to figure out the nuts and bolts of any variable.

However, WordPress can only do so much. In the social media sector, WordPress still needed social platforms to catch up to them. Luckily, Facebook finally has caught on.

This month, Facebook announced integrations for both WordPress.com and WordPress.org. The updates facilitate cross content marketing, allowing WordPress users to publish on their own sites while simultaneously posting to both their own Facebook timelines and their brand or business pages.

Content marketers will rejoice, especially those with a powerful following or requiring specific outreach campaigns. The new updates allow you to single out friends to whom content can be directly marketed to – so no more trolling page after page to post on individual timelines. Marketers can also take advantage of new customizable widgets such as “like” and “subscribe” buttons.

The changes also keep readers in mind. There’s an activity feed tracker so readers can follow you more easily. But best of all, there’s a comment box feature that allows readers to offer comments to both your site and to Facebook. Prior to this update, this was the most vexing thing about posting to Facebook. Sure, you want a dialogue on your Facebook page – but you also recognize the worth of comments on your own website. However, no one is going to take the time to post on both; they’re going to post where they already are and that’s on Facebook.

So what’s the motivation for Facebook’s sudden interest in WordPress users? It’s probably because nearly a quarter of blog users go with WordPress options. Yet, even that alone isn’t reason enough since these stats have been quite high for some time now.

Perhaps it’s got to do something with Facebook’s more recent direction. Recognizing the value of the social web, they want to be the frontrunners in that field. Even with 900 million users under their belt and over 500 billion collective minutes spent daily, a social web leader needs to offer users a far more interactive experience. Making life easier for WordPress users is a start.

Facebook hasn’t made the same accommodations for the ever popular Blogger platform. That probably has a lot to do with the fact that Blogger is owned by Google, an arch rival. Blogger is also less advanced, having attracted users primarily because it is mindlessly simple to use and has demonstrated an inability to evolve past the primate stage.

For our Benchmark users out there, if you’d like to integrate your email marketing with your WordPress page, check out Benchmark Email’s popular WordPress Plugin.