Recently Facebook launched their campaign to further dominate the web and it’s not only going to work, it’s working already! Facebook Social Plugins is an incredible group of plugins that’ll change the way humans integrate with the web. It brings word of mouth, social re-enforcement and peer pressure to any site that’s willing, or clever enough, to add a plugin.
These plugins bring a never seen before lebvel of personalization to the rest of the web, and because the content is hosted on Facebook’s servers, it’ll do so whether the visitor is logged in or not to the 3rd party site.
So how do you know which plugin or combination of plugins to use? Here’s a quick overview of the social plugins; what they do, where to use them and what you might get out of it:
Like Button
What does it do?
This button allows visitors to “Like” or “Recommend” a page on your site & will post a link directly into their Facebook feed. Superb for generating awareness. It will also show visitors which of their friends have liked or recommend the page already. There are a number of very powerful, but advanced features to this button – I won’t cover these in this entry.
Where should you use it?
EVERYWHERE! On absolutely every page on every site you have!
What will you get out of it?
Awareness, free advertising, free traffic and social re-enforcement, therefore.... More conversions!
Like Box
What does it do?
See which of their friends likes the page, read the posts fed from an existing Facebook Page and like the Facebook Page without having to visit the page. It’s has a similar function as having a twitter feed piped onto your site, yet it pulls info from your Facebook Page.
Where should you use it?
This is very powerful if you have a Facebook Page. If you don’t, set one up. It’s even possible and maybe effective to set up an entire page on your site to
What will you get out of it?
More followers to your Facebook page, plus once again - awareness, free advertising, free traffic and social re-enforcement, therefore.... More conversions!
Comments
What does it do?
This will allow visitors to post comments on any aspect of your website and also gives the ability to like. These comments can be shared on the visitor’s walls and their friends streams.
Where should you use it?
On any page where comments are encouraged.
What will you get out of it?
Visitor engagement, hopefully some constructive comments and possibly the creation of a talking-point.
Facepile
What does it do?
This is a simple plugin that shows visitors which of their friends have already signed up on a site. The plugin doesn’t render if the visitor is logged out of Facebook or if they don’t have any friends signed up.
Where should you use it?
This is a useful social re-enforcer to nudge visitors to sign up or stay on a site instead of bouncing. It must be used on busy or very localised sites, where the chance of a visitor sharing the interest in the same site as his / her friends is high, otherwise the plugin will be wasted. The site should be static or have limited content, such a standard business site with only a services or products to choose from. If the site in question has lots of content, or many products I would rather consider the Activity Feed plugin. Say for instance a well known local webhosting company.
What will you get out of it?
It’ll increase your conversion ratios. If you see your friends did it, you’ll do it.
Login with Faces
What does it do?
Visitors are shown which of their friends has signed up for the site and are encouraged to login themselves.
Where should you use it?
Any site that has login facilities.
What will you get out of it?
More logins!
Activity Feed & Recommendations
What does it do?
These plugins shows visitors what their friends recently found interesting, appealing or entertaining. The Activity Feed plugin becomes useful when you want to encourage people and channel them to find content that is relevant to them.
Where should you use it?
As mentioned above, this is far more beneficial when there is a significant amount of content. Examples would be YouTube, CNN, blogs, online shopping sites or your local news site.
What will you get out of it?
This is a powerful on-site browsing driver and will keep people on your site for longer and we all know what that does for goal conversion rates!
Live Stream
What does it do?
This allows visitors to see what is being said about a page or event in real-time. The feed displays the comments of friends and non-friends as well if selected.
Where should you use it?
This is a great tool for pages relating to real-time events; concerts, streaming media, sporting events etc.
What will you get out of it?
Social awareness and engagement.
For more information and the actually plugin code take a look at Facebook’s Social Plugin pages. We've already added the plugins into our blog, just log into facebook and you can like this entry. We'll be extending the service to our client's sites over the next few weeks.
Chris Jacoby our resident developer genius will be writing a blog on how to integrate the code, I’ll set up a link to the entry as soon as it’s up. Want to know how Google’s going to play in this realm? Read my blog entry on Google’s Social Search Engine.
To increase your social media presence even further, I also suggest utilising a 3rd party social bookmarking button on every page. Look at AddThis.
Make sure your on this bus early, it’s going to get more and more important as the world heads in the direction of a social and personalized world wide web.
