Everyone these days seem to have a facebook account. Why shouldn’t they? Facebook has become a central point of communication in our daily life and helps us stay in touch with friends and family and see what they are doing without much effort. Holiday pictures, video albums and latest gossip are at out fingertips and as more people join the network, it becomes even more important for us webmasters to leverage the power of Facebook.
Use Facebook Connect to give visitors an alternative to registering on your website
Let’s face it – nobody likes having to register on websites to access a service, whether it’s for commenting on an article or asking a question on a forum. With so many websites out there, it becomes very difficult to keep track of the different username/password for each site and this is a major put off for a lot of visitors. By allowing the visitors of your site to login using Facebook, you’ll get more people to post on your site or better still engage more. You will get access to the visitor name, email address, friends and a lot more. All the essential details that you want to capture in your registration page will be made available to you with Facebook Connect. Of course this should be used to complement your own registration page because not everyone is on Facebook and you cannot just allow anyone to engage with your site without registration because that’s going to get the attention of spammers but using Facebook Connect will make users engage more with your site.
Let other people know about your content with Facebook Share button
Facebook Share button is a bit different from Facebook Like button and is meant to be used to allow sharing your content even easier. If you display a Facebook Share button on your site and a user clicks it, your content will be made available to all the friends of this user. This is viral marketing in its simplest. The average Facebook user has around 120 friends and that content will be read by that many people if not more. A count of the number of times the content has been shared is shown next to the button as well and this shows how popular was content is.
Facebook Like button is a great way to get more people to visit your website
When people click on the Facebook Like button on your website, it tells you how many people actually like your content and since this is syndicated to the user’s activity in Facebook, you will get other people to your site who want to check what it is all about. Some people like using the Like and Share button alongside and it’s not that difficult to set up even for beginners.
Facebook API
If you have a website, you’ll need to get a Facebook API key to get the most of what Facebook has to offer you. You can use the Standard JavaScript SDK to enable Facebook features on your site but you’ll need access to that API key. Of course, if you’re a more experienced programmer, you can always code your own things and get more advanced features by querying Facebook.