Switchfast Blog: The Future of IT
Facebook Seamless Sharing and your Small Business
Wednesday, November 23, 2011 by Michael Lewis
During the Facebook Developer's conference, F8, Facebook
announced an update to its Open Graph API. Open Graph is a set of
tools that website developers can use to integrate their website
into Facebook.
One of the new features of Open Graph lets content publishers
"seamlessly share" a Facebook user's activity. If you have a friend
using Spotify, the music streaming service, you might have noticed
a running list of what songs they are listening to. Two major
newspapers are also taking advantage of seamless sharing. If you
use the Washington Post or The Guardian's
Facebook apps, the stories you read are posted on your
mini-feed.
There are two issues with this new seamless sharing.
The Privacy Issue
As with every major update to the way Facebook interacts with
the rest of the web, privacy watch dogs are concerned about what
seamless sharing will expose. Facebook has a history of opting
users in to sharing personal information without the user's
explicit consent. Seamless sharing does not opt in users. It
requires users to be using an app within Facebook's own interface
or with 3rd party apps that require Facebook credentials
to log in.
Since seamless sharing requires interactions with app, it will
follow your established security settings. If you are concerned
about privacy, and are using Facebook with any regular basis, this
would be a good time to go into your settings to make sure they are
set up properly.
Over Sharing
Many publishers are really excited about seamless sharing. It is
going to have the effect of pushing updates into friends of fan's
news feeds thus exposing headlines and links to an exponentially
larger number of new people. This is going to push up impressions
and potentially drive new traffic. But, like the Farmville of the
past, it is going to annoy friends and end up being blocked.
Seamless sharing is the new over-share.
Publishers want to reduce friction to sharing posts, believing
that making it easier to add a link to Facebook is enough to make
their product the next "big thing". But it is not, and never will
be, the raw number of shares a blog post view has. It is about who
is sharing them and why it is being shared. When someone posts a
news item or funny image on their wall their act of marking it has
some special value. Sharing every article that is skimmed reduces
the value of all posts.
Our advice, avoid seamless sharing. Stick with the standard
"Share This" on blog posts and post your most important stuff on a
fan page. Annoying fans and their friends is never an effective
marketing tactic.
Until next time -
Mike Lewis
Switchfast Technologies
Chicago IT Support &
Consulting
DC IT Support &
Consulting
Outsourced Marketing Services
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