Facebook Makes Your Site More Social

As part of their recently announced Open Graph Protocol, Facebook launched a number of new plugins to make integrating with their site easier. Probably the most important of these is the new ‘like’ button. This simple to add snippet of code allows a user to quickly ‘vote’ on the current page and see which of their Facebook friends have already voted. You can try it at the bottom of this post.

Next up is the Facebook recommendation plugin. They’ve again made it very easy to integrate and it shows which pages/products/etc on your site are most popular as voted for by your users. They’ve also changed the way users interact with Facebook pages. No longer are you asked to become a fan, now you simply ‘like’ something.

Whenever you ‘like’ something it shows in your Facebook profile so your friends are made aware of your choices. Facebook estimated they’d serve over a billion ‘likes’ in the first 24 hours of launch which gives you an idea of the incredible potential for social marketing the ‘like’ button brings. Now, only three weeks since launching their social plugins, Facebook claim they have been installed on over 100,000 sites.

With well over 400 million Facebook users (probably closer to 500 million), the ‘like’ button is going to be absolutely huge. Most of our work is business to business and I think the ability to ‘like’ pages and products is of less importance to us than for business to consumer sites. That doesn’t mean it’s unimportant though, it’s absolutely worth including or at least considering its inclusion in all manner of B2B scenarios. And that importance will continue to grow as Facebook becomes ever more pervasive. Likewise, the change from ‘become a fan’ to ‘like’ is a massive improvement and I’m sure will encourage far, far more people to sign up to company Facebook feeds than previously. Consider the influence this will have on an individuals average of 130 friends and the significance becomes clear. Update: A Mashable poll suggests the tech community prefer being fans. We don’t, and maintain ‘Like’ will encourage use.

The choices our peers make is widely accepted as being a strong influencer on our own choices. The introduction of the like button could signify the beginning of a shift from automated recommendations (from search engines) to peer recommendations and drives home the importance of being involved. Om Malik of the tech site GigaOM summed it up to the BBC.

“The thing is Google understands data very well, it doesn’t understand people. I don’t think that is a problem for Facebook who understand them almost too well. The Google web is about looking for things and the Facebook web is about serendipity.”

For web developers, Digital Inspiration have a useful guide on integrating the Facebook ‘like’ button.