IGNITE YOUR BUSINESS VISIBILITY WITH FACEBOOK CONNECT

Have you ever wished you lived in a shopping mall? It sounds funny, but it would make life a lot easier, especially if you lived in a huge mall like West Edmonton Mall or the Mall of America.

You could park the car, enter the building, and everything you needed would be laid out in front of you without ever having to leave home. Stores in that mall would probably get a lot more business than stores outside the mall because it would be easier to access them, and residents of the mall would recommend certain shops and services to each other by word of mouth.

Fbconnect

Now imagine you had a place to live on the Internet and were able to visit different websites without having to give up the comfort of that home. The Facebook Connect feature was unveiled in 2008 to create easy, one-stop access to websites from your Facebook profile. It’s an API that enables people to use their Facebook identity and connections to authenticate themselves on any third-party site, community or blog. In essence, it makes your Facebook profile the “home base” and eliminates the need for new sign-ups on other websites.

In Powered, Inc.’s e-book “Marketing Predictions for 2010,” Aaron Strout, Chief Marketing Officer, predicts that Facebook Connect will play an increasingly important role in the ways brands connect with their customers and other constituents on Facebook in 2010.

It’s already showing an incredible ability to help businesses draw more Traffic, thereby increasing their Return on Influence and ultimately their Return on Investment.

Here are some examples:

Increased Traffic:

The Official Facebook Connect News Page reports that since implementing Facebook Connect, the CBS Insider has gained a significant increase in traffic on theinsider.com, with over 85% of new registered users using Facebook Connect.

Increased Return on Influence

According to Facebook’s latest statistics from Citysearch,”Since implementing Facebook Connect, daily registrations have tripled, and connected users are twice as engaged as users not using Facebook Connect. 94% of users who write reviews share those reviews back on Facebook, where 70% of their friends who see the review click on it.”

This points to the viral nature of Facebook Connect, the ability of users to bring content, activity and conversations from third-party sites back into their Facebook newsfeed, thereby creating more social engagement.

Increased Return on Investment

Lauren Miller in her article “5 Services Using Facebook Connect Effectively” reports that although the Tap Tap Revenge 3 App on the iPhone may be one of the simplest implementations of Facebook Connect on the iPhone, it’s become one of the biggest selling apps of all time on the app store. It works great because it gives you rewards when you tell your friends about the game and posts updates on your friends’ newsfeeds about your activity and scores.

All this being said, Facebook Connect has great potential to open up a very profitable niche for you and your clients’ businesses. This is good news for our VAClassroom graduates who are already providing Facebook services for their clients or are planning to add that service in the near future.

As Ken Burbury says in his article “Five Reasons Companies should be Integrating Social Media with Facebook Connect,” “At the end of the day, companies need to fish where the fish are. And right now the fish are spending their time on Facebook.”

What are your thoughts on Facebook Connect? We’d love to hear your comments!