A few months ago Facebook held their annual F8 conference and announced what could be this year’s biggest change on the web. CEO Mark Zuckerberg described a new concept dubbed ‘open graph’ designed to integrate Facebook with the rest of the internet. The concept will fundamentally share the information about an individual’s interests, friends and tastes, something that is gold dust for marketers. It will allow websites to access this information even if the user has never visited it before. Why? To create an unprecedented personalisation of the web.
Participating websites such as ‘Yelp’ can allow you to connect via your profile which will give them access to any information you have made public and in turn will give you tailored information about restaurants or music venues you might like. It is something you might find familiar if you are a user of Amazon.com, every time you visit the site it will give you personalised recommendations based on your previous purchases. But Zuckerberg thinks this is not enough. Many sites have previously used the application ‘Facebook Connect’ which allows you share information from a site on your profile for example; “Dave has just bought tickets to see Lady Gaga @ the O2 Arena”. However Facebook connect could only store the data for 24 hours and companies were not able to gather any useful information from it.
New plug-ins have also been introduced such apps that allow you to interact with Facebook whilst still on a different website, a good example is the new “like” button available on everything from Youtube videos to clothes in online shops. This is not only useful for the owners of those websites to tell what content or products are successful and popular and provides free advertising to that users friends.
Facebook, being founded by developers, has also considered the developers. Instead of a complex process of coding and integration to use the open graph or plug-ins, you only need to drop one line of HTML into your website. It is so simple that even a non-developer can do it.
In this video Facebook CEO Mark Zuckeberg explains the open-graph concept
What does this mean for E-Commerce?
Your online shopping experience will likely be much more personalised, you will probably only see products that you would consider buying, thus making it more likely that you will spend money rather than giving up after not finding what you are looking for.
Facebook may start driving more traffic to online shops than Google, more consumers will share opinions and information, something that is trusted by fellow consumers and is likely to stimulate shopping. Research shows that 90% of consumers trust recommendations from friends and this could play a huge part in the shopping habits of those users. However this could also have a negative effect, if someone buys something and it is a huge disappointment, everyone on their friend list will be informed, and companies will have to step-up their customer service to ensure that this doesn’t happen.
Google may indeed begin to adopt the open graph protocol and integrate data into search results, if you Google ‘funny movies’ then you may find a list of recommendations for the latest comedy flicks by thousands of Facebook users.
Much to the joy of online stores, conversion rates will increase, if you go to add something to your cart and it informs you that 5 of your friends have also bought the same thing, you are much more likely to buy it than you were before. Similarly, if nobody they know has bought it, they may think twice.
Facebook credits are a step closer to real money! Facebook credits have been around for a few years now and have so far only been used to buy and play apps such as Farmville or give gifts to your friends, but with the integration of open graph, what is to stop online stores accepting payments by Facebook credits. This would mean you never had to pull our your credit card or enter a PayPal password again, using one account to manage all your online spending. Facebook would obviously take a cut of this; well they need to make money somehow! One thing is for sure, they need a catchier name than ‘Facebook Credits’, how about ‘Fredits’... you heard it here first!
Whatever happens, Facebook looks sure to secure its place in the web for a long time to come and it’s safe to say that users and marketers are not going anywhere too soon. Facebook-enabled websites will become industry standard and a more essential piece of success online. Social optimisation and SEO will go hand in hand.
“The web is defaulting to social. It’s time to act accordingly.”
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO