Facebook Connect for Publishers
Why should all publishers be looking at Facebook Connect?
There are a number of websites to find examples of the cool stuff you can do by implementing Facebook Connect (FBC) into your product. Razorfish’s Jesse Pickard posted an article for insidefacebook.com that outlined a number of interesting connected applications, AllFacebook.com has a list of the “top” Facebook Connect enabled sites, and The Facebook Developer wiki aspires to maintain an exhaustive list of connected sites. If you are a PowerPoint freak, here is a slideshow created by social media marketing agency bigMETHOD, laying down the FBC basics.
The Facebook Connect homepage lays out the key benefits:
Enable your users to…
* Seamlessly “connect” their Facebook account and information with your site
* Connect and find their friends who also use your site
* Share information and actions on your site with their friends on Facebook
Beyond that, they also claim:
“early results have shown that sites using Facebook Connect for login have seen as many as 2 out of 3 new registrations come via Facebook Connect, and those users have about 50% more engagement on sites.”
The enthusiasm for FBC and excitement about its potential is significant.
However, our clients (large media companies and brands) have been hesitant to adopt, or even experiment with FBC because of some early assumptions relating primarily to user data access.
I would like to try to address some of the questions I have been asked by these clients about Facebook Connect.
What user data do I get from Facebook?
What data can I keep?
What can I store in my CRM?
Will my community be limited to Facebook users?
What user data do I get from Facebook?
First, you need to understand that there is information you can call and information you can keep.
The information you can keep is the minimum required in order to properly call the data you need for your application.
The Facebook API includes calls to do just about anything you can imagine with a Facebook user. These things include:
- Events: Create, edit, list, delete, RSVP
- Photos and Videos: get, list and create albums, get list and upload photos, get and set tags
- Friends: list a users friends, get a list of friends using your app (more about friends below)
- Marketplace: get, add, categorize and modify listings
- Status: Get and set the user’s status (this is brand-spanking and kind of a big deal)
- Notes: Get, edit, delete and create notes (also new, gives you access to a user’s ‘blog’ on Facebook)
- Links: Get a user’s posted items, and allow a user to post directly from your app (also new, just a better way to do what you could already do)
What data can I keep?
This is the most frequent question I get. It stems from the perceived value of a registered user database and their demographic information. As stated above, you can only store the minimum amount of data that is required to identify a user to the API in order to call back data.
You can view the entire list of 12 items here, but the following are helpful for this post:
- uid (User ID)
- flid (friend list ID)
- proxied_email (Placeholder email addresses for your users)
In addition, you may store data explicitly defined as Exportable Facebook Properties, of which there are none.
It is important to note that any information that you request from Facebook can only be cached on your servers for up to 24 hours “for performance reasons”. You can, of course, automatically request all the relevant data every 24 hours, so the effect is that you always have the data to display. What’s the difference? If I close my Facebook account, you also lose access to my data.
Makes sense to me.
One of the most important items for our clients is the user’s email address. By default, you can send users email via proxied email. Basically, you can send users email, but you don’t get to know what the email address is. Another downside of this process is that you are limited to sending 100 emails at a time. One good thing is that you can send email that appears from your domain.
What about all the other juicy demographic tidbits that I want to store in my ultra-sophisticated CRM?
You can still ask for it, so you should.
Use the FBC register and login method to a) make it dead easy to register, b) get access to lots of cool FB features. If you are running a community or a contest, simply make the registration process two steps:
- Click to connect with Facebook or create a new account on our site
- Ask for additional information, including email address, mailing address, postal code, blood type, mother’s maiden name, pet’s name, phone number, mailing list opt-in preferences and demographic questions.
According to the Facebook Development Team (if that is indeed your real name), “If you have users manually enter email addresses, then you are permitted to store or export those as you see fit (provided that you display your Privacy Disclosure and Terms of Use on the page that you request that data).
Will my branded community be limited to Facebook users?
No, but you can grow your community and your database much more quickly and organically if you leverage the FBC Friend Linking feature.
In my opinion, this is the most interesting and significant function of Facebook Connect, especially with respect to the types of projects I work on with our clients. These projects are user-generated content communities and contests primarily. If the goal is to drive people to the site, then this is how to do it.
The feature includes two main functions:
- Users can join your community via FBC, and invite their voracious consumer friends to join via Facebook
- You can suggest current, non-Facebook connected members of your community to the new user so that they can be invited
Here is an excellent (if ugly) flow chart describing the friend linking feature by Cameron McGrane.
The connect acceptance sends the user back to your site, where you can run them through the full registration gauntlet.
The second function is particularly valuable to publishers who wish to add FBC features to their existing community. As new users join, existing members can be prompted by their friends to link their Facebook accounts to their community accounts.
You may have a niche community where users will want to be friends with others on your site, but not necessarily be friends on Facebook. Using a platform like Media Factory, Facebook users can potentially be friends with your non-Facebook users, and even Google Friend Connect users.
This all sounds a bit complicated…
This blog post concentrates on the “what” with respect to implementing Facebook Connect. The “how” is a bit more complex, and is covered in both excruciating detail and baffling ambiguity at the Facebook wiki and forum.
To summarize:
- You should use Facebook Connect to grow your user base and increase engagement
- You get what you need from Facebook
- You get what you want from the user directly
- You can start with an existing database and are not limited to Facebook users
If you would like to take some of these features for a quick test drive, join this blog from the right sidebar, and publish a comment on this article to your news feed!
Hi Jayson,
I really appreciated this post. It has given me some really useful ideas for some of our websites, and our clients’ as well. Cheers,
Emmet Gibney