In March, Facebook hosted 484 million unique visitors worldwide, up 22 million from February, per comScore. On average, people log in 11 times a month, meaning a big pile of people increasingly treat the site like home base for sharing and discovering what's cool and in and groovy.
Good news for marketers: It's easier than ever to shimmy in on this party! In April, Facebook launched Social Plugins and Open Graph Protocol, two ways to increase engagement on its site and yours. Here's the skinny:
Social Plugins. The "Like" plugin lets users "like" content on your site, which spreads to their friends' newsfeeds. Tack the "Activity Feed" plugin to that, and visitors can view what their friends found most interesting chez vous! Another plugin, "Recommendations," recommends your content to people looking at similar stuff. How much work is all this gonna take? One line of HTML, says Facebook.
Open Graph Protocol. This nifty feature takes pages you add to Facebook's Open Graph, its global network of cool things, and treats them like "objects" that people can add to their profiles. Per Facebook: "When a user establishes this connection by clicking Like on one of your Open Graph-enabled pages, you gain the lasting capabilities of Facebook Pages: a link from the user's profile, ability to publish to the user's News Feed, inclusion in search on Facebook, and analytics [via Facebook's Insights product]."
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