Almost every website has a goal of increasing participation and creating connections. Well that is what Facebook is all about. Facebook Connect lets users bring their identity and connections from Facebook to your website. Once they connect with our sites through Facebook Connect we can then bring in their name, photos, events, friends, connections, activity, distribution and much more. We can even use these user’s conenctions to publish our content to. Which basically means that whenever someone connects to us through Facebook connect we will most likely get another user due to publishing our content on their activity stream. This applies a viral nature to new sign ups that the internet has never seen before.
If you don’t think that tapping into this resource is important, please watch this video.
- Facebook Connect increases commenting by 15%-20%
- Facebook Connect increases registration by 15%
Facebook is a huge resource for companies now who want to allow their users to quickly engage with them and uses them as a publishing outlet. The implementation of this is not out of our reach and can give us lots of possibilities in our interactive experiences.
Example:
In this example Prototype (a console game) is using the user’s information from their Facebook through Facebook Connect to bring their information into a video intro that has their content. So they see their name, place they live during this video intro. This personalizes the video intro for the user and really speaks to the narrative of the game and experience. Watch the video or experience it yourself with your Facebook account.
Pros:
- Increases engagement
- Brings the users information to the site
- Turns every user into a possible publishing outlet for viral marketing
Cons:
- Some users may not like this method of connecting
- Depends on Facebook
- Fairly new, so there is a learning curve
Why Is It Important To Us:
- We are constantly searching for the best way to connect to our users, this is a new and very successful way for users to connect to brands and engage them in a way we were not able to do
- Gives us an opportunity of using our users as a viral marketing outlet, which not only brings more people to the site, but also shows the brand as up to date with what is going on in the social space.