Social Media Marketing For Dummies, 2nd Edition

Facebook Social Plug-ins

Practicing SMM on your website doesn’t just mean opening it up to the social web by making the content more pluckable and including tools that enable consumers to share the content more easily. It also means making your own website truly social by bringing your customers’ social graphs to your website.

With the advent of technologies like Facebook’s s social plug-ins (shown in Figure 15-9), OpenSocial, and Microsoft’s own data portability initiatives, it’s now possible to bring a consumer’s social graph to your website. For example, you can include the login information for Facebook on your website using a plug-in. Upon login, the user’s friends list also appears on your website. You can then share their activity for your user. In other words, your website becomes a location where a consumer can see and participate with his existing network of friends as he makes brand affinity and purchasing decisions.

Through these technologies, any third-party website (including yours) can take a customer’s profile data — including age, gender, region, and interests — from his profile on a social platform and match them to any action, such as purchasing, commenting, or reviewing. If you’re a user logging in to a website, you can, for example, see user-generated content prioritized to display your friends first, followed by other people in your region, of your age, and with your interests.

Figure 15-9: Facebook social plug-ins.

Probably the most famous example of ...