When a user connects to a friend on Facebook or clicks “Like” on a page in Facebook, the web of connections created is called the social graph. Facebook has a huge social graph with more than 400 million users, and at the f8 developer conference, they announced that they would open this graph to other websites. The idea is that giving social context to time spent on the internet creates value, because I would rather see recommendations on news from my friends and would give more credence to a product recommendation from someone I know.
Mark Zuckerberg explains the concept of the Open Graph API in this video clip from the conference:
For the full keynote video, go to www.facebook.com/f8
Many studies, including a recent article listed in The Buzz, have found that people trust their friends, so messages about products or service that contain social context have better recall, recognition, and even purchase intent. Basically, Facebook is offering the use of their social graph information to help any website make its pages more social. They are doing this through the use of plug-ins. It is not a completely altruistic offering. In order for the plug-ins to work, sites have to use branded Facebook features and for the most engaging tools, use Facebook as a login. This advances Facebook toward becoming the common center for a user’s online identity, and Facebook maintains control of the valuable information about a user’s likes and behaviors on the web.
Using Facebook features, though, is beneficial. It is a platform many people are comfortable with, and the tools make it easy for visitors to share information from anywhere on the web with their social network. Facebook logins drive traffic better than other universal logins, and each plug-in has a different way of allowing a brand, product, service, or company to interact with its potential customers. Over 50,000 websites have decided to implement the plug-ins in the first week.
What It Means for Your Business’ Online Presence
Let’s take a look at some of the new features you can implement on your website to create a more engaging experience for visitors:
1. The “Like” Button
This feature allows visitors to “Like” anything on the web. By clicking on this button, the user is creating a permanent, public link on her profile and publishing that connection to her news feed where friends will see it. This permanent connection provides the same features available with a Facebook page and includes the content as a page in Facebook searches. The publisher of the content can get demographic information about who is sharing this content by using the updated Insights analytics provided by Facebook. Because this creates a permanent link, a publisher can send updated stories to a connected user through the news feed.
2. Activity Feed
This plug-in allows a publisher to show a visitor what her friends are doing on your website. If I log in to nytimes.com using Facebook, I will see what activities my friends participated in on the site, such as “John Keehler liked this story.” If I do not log in using Facebook, I’ll see a more general list of activities, such as “118 people liked this story.” This does not publish content back to a user’s Facebook page, and Facebook hosts all of the information. The website is providing a portal to display Facebook data rather than actually gaining access to it. This allows for news and content to have social context and guide a visitor to more relevant content as she navigates your site.
3. Recommendations
This plug-in creates a similar portal to the Activity Feed but provides personal recommendations to each visitor using all the information Facebook has about activity on that website. It will show a new visitor the most popular pages for that day. If I log in using Facebook, the feature gives preference to those actions taken by my friends.
You can see a complete list of plug-ins at developers.facebook.com. The Open Graph API also means that we can expect developers to create new and more robust applications that use any public information on the graph to create customized experiences for Facebook users around the web.
Advantages:
These tools create a more personalized experience for customers that visit your sites. They can share information with friends without navigating away from your page or stick around to read suggested articles their friends have read. You can also receive data about how information is shared that can be used to improve content or better understand your audience. Because users are already comfortable with Facebook and the tool is easy to use, feedback through the “Like” button is more probable than a new user signing in to comment.
Advertising works best when it’s relevant. Information helps make advertising relevant, and the “Like” button will create more robust interests information by allowing users to easily create more connections. While no new information will be available to advertisers on Facebook, advertisers can still target groups of people based on their public interests. More information in that section will ideally allow advertisers to serve more relevant ads to users.
Caveats:
Some of these features encourage users to use their Facebook identity online rather than logging in separately at each website. This provides a great deal of convenience for the users, but may discourage them from joining the site directly. So there’s a bit of a trade off between increasing the traffic and engagement with your website and building your own database with data given directly by joining members.
What The Facebook Users Think
The Open Graph does not share any information not already set to be viewed by “Everyone” in a user’s privacy settings. Unfortunately, how information is being shared is not clearly understood by all members of the Facebook community. Just as before, Facebook provides granular control over what information can be shared with each connection. Many people, including four senators, believe that Facebook has erred though by making privacy the responsibility of the user, creating defaults in the least private settings, and making the process of controlling member privacy too confusing.
With the new tools came a new privacy setting called Instant Personalization. This particular feature has to do with information sharing to Facebook’s three partners, Microsoft Docs, Yelp, and Pandora, who can access information directly, unlike those sites using plug-ins. Users can opt-out in Privacy Settings, but are miffed that they weren’t asked to opt-in instead. The privacy story is getting more interesting as Facebook begins requiring users to link to community pages and interest pages in order to populate their profiles. For further reading on this topic, check out Forrester’s perspective.
If you are concerned about what information you share as a user, take the time to review your privacy settings. If you want some help navigating, check out Mashable’s article.
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