With the recent Facebook F8 new releases, many marketers are still not quite clear what this mean for them. There are a few powerful social plug-in features available for marketers to use when building creatives/fan pages/microsites to engage with customers. Here are some materials straight out of Facebook sales presentation with my own thought added. It’s a no brainer that the change from “Become a Fan” to “Like” greatly increase the engagement rate, Facebook’s own data shown incredible lift. Not sure if anyone notice, but the “Link All to my Profile” features essentially brought in a lot of commercial intent “Fan Pages” into your profile. As a marketer I like the feature as they make Facebook users more targetable, but personally, I would most likely reject this and choose not to auto-link.
Here are the Facebook F8 Social Plug-in features to build instantly engaging experiences, a smarter and more personalized web (sales pitch).
• 1. Like Button – Share pages from your site back to their Facebook profile with one click
• 2. Recommendation – Gives uers personalized suggestions for pages on your site they might like (Recommendation is essential a heavy version of interaction and more appropriate for commercial products, not sure what value does it have for site monetized base on page view or ads)
• 3. Login with Faces – The Login with Faces plugins shows profile pictures of the user’s friends who have already signed up for your site in addition to a login button (The idea here is to increase trust by showing you people you know, it’s ok, your friend already did, go ahead and give in. )
• 4. Comment – The comments plugin lets users comment on any piece of content on your site
• 5. Activity Feed – The Activity feed plugin shows users what their friends are doing on your site through likes and comments
• 6. Like Box – The Like box enables users to like your Facebook page and view its stream directly from your website
• 7. Facepile – The facepile plugin shows profile pictures of the user’s friends who have already signed up for your site (This is risky as you can’t control what your fans would post on your wall)
• 8. Live Stream – The live stream plugin lets your users share activity and comments in real-time as they interact during a live event (This is super easy to use, and you can even use your webcam, obviously not as scalable as USStream if you have 50k viewers)
As your customers engage, you can now get more information about them via Facebook Insight or API via third party analyic vendors like WebTrend or Omniture, and you are allowed to store the data for more than 24 hours now. Pretty powerful features and the ability to engage with existing Facebook users on your existing site greatly enhanced.