Social Media Optimization: Facebook’s 300 Million Strong Connect

Out of all the social media marketing platforms, Facebook is the one constantly pushing out new features. Earlier this month, Facebook closed down its controversial Beacon service, which tracked user activities on outside websites and reported the information to their friends. The service never caught on, as users were outraged about an invasion of privacy.

Beacon’s successor is Facebook Connect. It is a universal log-in tool offered to third party developers and websites. It pulls information about visitors from Facebook and can send that activity back to that user’s news feed. Unlike Beacon, Connect has been a success in the year since its implementation.

As of today, the social media giant is simplifying the process of applying Connect to a website with their Facebook Connect Wizard and Playground tools. Before this, those who wished to implement Connect as a social media optimization tool needed a decent coding background, making it more of a hassle than an advantage to those who couldn’t code. Now, you just need: the name of your site, a URL, and to deposit a file to the site’s main directory. Facebook’s Playground tool provides the codes you need to embed into your website as well as functional codes for login buttons, profile photos, and publishing items to news feeds.

Another social media optimization perk that Facebook announced was a “Translations for Facebook Connect” tool. If a user logs into a third-party website through Connect, they can easily translate the page into the language associated with that user’s Facebook account.

An estimated 15,000 sites are utilizing Facebook Connect. Its incredible distribution potential has helped propel the social media optimization platform above its competitors and the social media site's rising popularity in areas outside of the U.S.

In terms of social media optimization, this is a great method of creating exposure for your business. When logged into Connect on your site, users can forward information they find interesting to their social network via their feeds. As we all know, consumers trust personal recommendations over third party ones. Connect is a good path for social media optimization.

Written by Daisy K.