Power, Simplicity, and Easy Access to Over 300,000,000 People
Facebook is currently the social networking leader on the internet in terms of technology, innovation, and versatility, and it is home to over 300,000,000 members. If you belong to a small business, new business, or web startup you want need access to this valuable group of consumers and potential customers. Lucky for you, there are a few ways you can reach this group extremely easily.
Facebook Page. This the sort of default option for business looking to engage their customer base. It provides an excellent platform for listening, connecting, interacting, and gauging customer support and reactions to your product or service. Some companies have started to rely heavily on this part of Facebook for marketing, advertising, and alerting customers to new products. A few companies have even shifted almost their entire online presence to Facebook. In commercials for Honda cars, Honda includes their facebook.com/honda URL at the end of the commercial. Skittles has redirected their skittles.com website to the official Skittles Facebook page. Vitamin Water has just finished letting their customers design, build, and give their input on the newest flavor of the beverage. Facebook pages are valuabe, and are much more than just another place to stake your claim and push out simple notifications of sales. People expect to be engaged with on Facebook, give them what they want.
Facebook Connect. Facebook Connect allows people to sign up and log in to an account on your website with their Facebook credentials. Depending on the parameters you set, their activity can be shared with in their feed on Facebook. The first ones into the “universal login” space was an outfit by the name of OpenID. OpenID is still used for some places. In more recent months Google’s login has gained a bit of traction, and I expect even more as soon as the Google ID login is made mandatory for users of Y0uTube. Twitter has also gained a bit of space in the universal login market, and will perhaps continue to do so across the many different social media apps being launched. The universal login mechanism met with the most fanfare, and with perhaps the most potential, is Facebook connect.
Unless you are attempting to build the next Facebook, I would strongly encourage you to consider integrating Facebook Connect into your member driven website. It seems almost illogical to defy Facebook’s popularity and reach. In the world of business, simplicity usually wins. Facebook Connect is simple, I will leave the conclusion up to you.
Up until this point, I have painted a rather rosy picture of Facebook Connect. I should note that Facebook Connect does come with a few cons. The main drawback to using Facebook Connect is the lack of email address when a user signs up. When mass mailings are sent out to members/users, they are sent to the Facebook inbox, which in turn notifies the users via email. This is not intrinsically bad, because people will frequently check their messages on Facebook but there is the possibility that you will lose your awesome graphics and formatting of your newsletter/mass mailing. The other potential con that Facebook Connect carries with it is the noise factor. Unless you set up the controls otherwise, each move your member makes may be rebroadcast on Facebook. This could cause annoyance to the friends of your users and therefore alienate them from your product or brand.
