Facebook Social Plugins: What do they really do? @KarlHavard

If you've been managing a Facebook "Fan Page" for your brand, you'll know about the insights and stats that Facebook give you. Although, you'd be forgiven if you haven't been able to find access to them for a while. Fan page administrators used to be able to click "view insights" from the edit fan page facility, but it has disappeared. If you're still looking for it, just login to your Facebook account that has administrator access and enter the url http://www.facebook.com/insights and "hey presto" you'll see how to access the stats.

What you will also see is the new way to view activity. Of course, if you are the type of person who is a little set in their ways you are able to view in the old format, but we'd recommend being somewhat adventurous and saying "what the heck" and taking a peek at the new format. All the good stuff is still in there and our opinion is, it is easier to make sense of various factors.

What is most excellent is as well as seeing the number of likes and "dislikes; the type of interactions; the type of media used and demographic information; there is a chart which shows the referring url to the fan page. The image below shows some real charts, with names removed to protect the innocent, which you can expand by clicking on.

Even cooler than this is now the ability to track the interaction with the Like button on your own domain. If you haven't already, you should seriously consider including the Like button on your own domains as there are a number of benefits. Facebook now gives you the ability to track activity....and so they should. Their previous Facebook Share button analytics were a little bit ropey and now we can see why, as they were focusing their efforts on the Like stuff.

First, on the insights page you have to enter your domain and then add the code provided to your domain html, in the same way you'd add Google Analytics code. Fairly easy, and very clever...in our opinion. Here's what it looks like:

The stats provided show the number of likes on a daily basis from your domain and the associated demographics. 

The data for all insights is downloadable in CSV format and hence can be correlated with your own website analytics against the same timeline. Very powerful indeed.

All we need now is for Twitter to offer the same for their new Tweet button, especially having stomped all over Tweetmeme's business!! 

On the surface, it looks harmless. A small button that should you click on it, tells your friends on Facebook that you "Like" something. Your friends, especially the really nosey ones, should they see your wall update, can click through to see exactly what it is you like. They in turn may choose to click the like button and in turn update all their Facebook friends. So, you can see the potential for good content to go viral.

Facebook decided on this approach for a number of reasons. The act of liking something with a single click requires minimum effort (especially if you're already logged into Facebook) and people's association with the term "Like" is a very positive one. The pass-on value that your friends like something does encourage others to check it out to see whether or not they agree. 

But it offers so much more than this. If you are a company/brand, adding a like button to the various areas of your site, will help gain exposure in the way explained above. If it is added to your site in the right way, you can also gain exposure to potentially untapped areas of Facebook too. The "Like" button is part of Facebook Open Graph, and the various buttons on your site can be associated with pre-defined Open Graph Objects. The full Open Graph Object list is not that extensive currently, but it is expected to grow. For example, if your website "About Us" section had a description of the senior management team, it is possible to add a "Like" button to each profile and associate this with the "Director" or "Public Figure" object. Not that exciting, but if your business has key people, deemed influential in their field, making sure their profile has good content and include information that some may wish to share and be associated with, why not add a "Like" button? By adding this to the "Director" object will mean the profile will gain exposure in Facebook in areas where Director is being discussed. An example of this is below:

Appearing in the "Director" interest page, will gain exposure to those people who have already liked this page. It may help if this person is a musician too, as "Musician" has a much higher level of exposure of currently 38,000+. This of course does mean the objects can be played about with and it isn't surprising that some likes are associated to the wrong categories on purpose. Short term thinking behind this is to gain higher levels of exposure, however, the audience who like something and are presented with something irrelevant to their likes, will not be impressed and this could tarnish reputation etc.

But, potentially more important than this, and probably the main driver for Facebook, is the re-indexing of the web for search purposes. Imagine a place in the not too distant future, where content is presented to you after a search which is sorted by the number of likes. Relevant content to your search term, which is ordered by the most likes i.e. I want to search for an article on "power of Facebook like". This article would feature nowhere!! (please "Like" it)  But should someone with a much bigger following eg. Mashable write a post on this, there is a very strong chance they will be at the top. We could argue, very badly, that this content is just as valuable, but they get the "votes" from many more people and quite rightly will rank much higher.

So, if your site has great content and you offer products, services, information, whatever really, get the "Like" button up there. It has a very strong relevance for the future.