Why You Should Care About Facebook Social Plugins

Facebook held its annual developer conference F8 yesterday and as expected announced not only their new Graph API and the Open Graph Protocol but also a suite of eight social plugins designed to not only be extremely easy to integrate into your existing site but also extremely powerful.

As explained by Facebook during the keynote the Social Plugins work to create a web that is instantly sociable and personalized. The genius of these plugins is not only their ease of integration (requiring only 1 line of code) but how when integrated with your site visitors can get personalized content from Facebook (including recommendations and seeing what their friends Like) without having to sign in to your site using connect.

Facebook is confident enough in their new Like button that they predict there will be over 1 billion Like Buttons within 24 hours of launch.

At the center of the Social Plugin suite will be the Like button that gives users that are/were logged into Facebook and now are visiting your site the ability to share pages back to Facebook with only one click and no dialog boxes to have to click through and they will be able to see which of their friends have also clicked the like button.

Launch partners such as NHL.com, Levis.com and IMDB.com have already implemented the Like buttons throughout their sites. On NHL.com you will find the buttons beside teams and players allowing you to Like and see who your friends like, Levis.com allows you to create a virtual place where you and your Facebook friends can see which clothing each other Like and at Imdb.com you can Like movies and see which of your Friends like the same movies you like as well. This data is all sent back to your wall in real time and if you combine the use of the like button on your site with the og: meta data even more data can be sent back to Facebook and retrieved for later use.

As I see it the second most important social plugin Facebook released would be Recommendations. This plugin is as simple as the Like button to integrate only requiring one line of code to be dropped in to your site in order to enable it. The power of the Recommendation is quickly realized as users of your site are offered site recommendations based solely on their Facebook friend’s usage of your site.

The next most important plugin that I think many sites will be integrating very soon is the Activity Feed plugin . This plugin works by displaying activity from users friends such as likes and comments that take place on your site and is as easy to integrate as all other plugins mentioned. If users can see that their friends have been active on a site it should encourage them to become active site users and participants as well.

Simply by integrating one of the available social plugins not only does your site become instantly social and personalized as intended, but it also gains access to the 400 million plus users currently using the Facebook platform. It is human nature that we don’t want to be alone and that we want to be at the places where our friends are because it makes us feel good knowing we are not alone. This is where the power of the Social Plugins becomes evident as it taps into our desire to not be alone by showing us that our friends have been to a site and that they have been active.

When a user is presented with this type of information upon visiting a site and without ever having to login it makes it easier to convert that new user into a regular participating member and this combination of easy to use and integrate social and personalization is exactly why you should care about the new Facebook social plugins.

What are your thoughts on the new tools and plugins recently released by Facebook? Will you be integrating any of the social plugins into your site?