birddog

Facebook Open Graph and what it means for everyone

Many people see Facebook as a closed space or ‘walled-garden’, and rightly so.  The original Facebook model was built around the content [and functionality] contained within the site only being accessible to registered users.  That’s sort of still the case now, but gradually Facebook is opening up the platform, to enable it to be integrated into website content that sits outside of facebook.com (or whichever country specific version of Facebook you access).

Facebook are constantly implementing news ways of interacting with other users of the site.  These interactions have come to be known as ‘social actions’. Sites such as Facebook offer many new ways in which to interact with content, such as commenting, ‘liking’, updating a status, tagging, opting in and out, polling, submitting content, discussing and sharing. These social actions are the new currency in the online social space, and social networks (or utilities as Facebook likes to be referred to) have quickly recognised this and have been developing their APIs to enable developers to integrate functionality from these networks into content that sits outside of the network itself.

Social actions also offer marketers a new type of metric by which to measure activity within any given campaign which involves social channels in the mix.

A while ago, Facebook launched ‘Connect’ which allowed content owners to include Facebook login areas – enabling visitors to log in to sites using their Facebook login credentials – sort of like Open ID.  Due to the success of Connect and the increasing demand from developers to do more with Connect, Facebook has now launched ‘Open Graph’.  In a nutshell, Open Graph allows website owners to integrate some of the functionality of Facebook into their own sites, such as allowing visitors to ‘like’ something, just as they would with a piece of content served within Facebook itself. For example, someone on Hewlett Packard’s website could ‘like’ a new server in a news release, just as they would ‘like’ something on Facebook but to use it, users need to be registered members of Facebook, and the content they are ‘liking’ must link to content within Facebook – the Hewlett Packard fan page for example.

Why are Facebook offering this I hear you ask?  Well let’s be clear. Just as Google created ‘Google Analytics’ and offer it for ‘free’, in return, they get statistics on millions of websites around the world, Facebook will now gain huge insight into the behaviour of its users on the sites they use when they’re not on Facebook.

It’s an advertisers dream!

Just think for a minute, detailed insight into user behaviour on a granular level never seen before, means being able to really target products and services at users on an entirely reactive level.  I’ll elaborate…

Imagine someone (let’s call them Mike) is in the market for a new TV.  Mike uses Facebook and has updated his status saying he’s off shopping, but he hasn’t said what for – it doesn’t really provide advertisers with the information to deliver a targeted and relevant advert to him.  He leaves Facebook and goes to Google and searches for ‘LCD TV’s’.  He then visits countless numbers of sites, including retailers, TV forums and shopping comparison sites to find out about the latest models. He eventually decides he likes an LG model but wants to get more information about it so he visits LG’s website to get the full specification. Whilst on LG’s site, he sees there’s an option to ‘like’ the TV, just as he would ‘like’ something in Facebook, so he clicks it.

He might just be window shopping at the moment, with the intention of buying within the next few months and so often, that is where the user journey ends – with a bookmark to the TV spec on LG’s site which he may or may not re-visit in a month’s time.  But by ‘liking’ the TV, he is then also doing a number of things in the background.   Just as any other Facebook action appears on your wall, so does an action using Open Graph.  Your friends can see what you’re doing outside of Facebook and can then interact with you.  Mike’s friend Chis is a bit of a TV geek and comments on Mike’s wall entry telling him that the TV is awesome and a really good choice, but in addition, Currys [the retailer] could serve Mike an advert tailored to that specific TV, offering Mike a discount.  Mike gets a relevant advert, Currys gets a sale. Everyone wins.

People may argue that this is yet another invasion of their privacy, but I don’t agree. It’s always optional to interact with content and actually, by ad and social networks gaining greater insight into their users, adverts will only become more targeted and more relevant to their audiences. Something’s got to pay the bills right? Bring it on!