Search engines are keen to find ways to represent the measure of your reputation and levels of activity on popular social media platforms such as Facebook in your search engine rankings. We as webmasters, website owners and users of social media platforms are keen to find ways to enlarge awareness of or brands and products, find new ways to communicate, engage with, and gather marketing intelligence from more customers and potential customers. We know this activity could lead to improved conversion rates on our websites and Facebook Pages. Aside from keeping up a good level of activity on our Facebook Pages themselves, publishing engaging content from our own and 3rd party sources in a mix of content types (text, video etc), and generally trying to direct people to the ‘Like’ button on our Facebook pages, what else should we be considering?

Social Media Plugins for our Web Pages

By inserting a variety of Social Media Plugins (like widgets) into areas of your web pages you can achieve a number things including gathering ‘Like’ button clicks for your Facebook Page without people actually having to visit the page (and gaining a much wider exposure through news feeds in the process), and give a brief glimpse of some important aspects of your Facebook Page to your website visitors.

3 Popular Plugins to Consider

1. The Like Button

You can add a ‘Like’ button to your Web pages. If your website visitor likes the content of your web pages (which implies that relevant, high value high quality web page content is an important factor in this) the result is:

An entry / story with a link to your website appears in the ‘News Feed’ of the ‘Friends’ of the person who clicked on the ‘Like’ button.
Your Page appears on the ‘Likes and Interests’ of the person’s Profile who clicked on the button.
You may receive more visitors to your web page perhaps with the added benefit of a kind or ‘recommendation’.
Your Facebook reputation gathers more weight from the extra ‘Like’ clicks.

Many people find it easier to add the ‘Like’ button to their web page using iFrames. You can however use XFBML to create the button. Although this requites the use of JavaScript it does make the button more versatile e.g. the button can dynamically re-size itself to take account of profile pictures, and optional ‘comment’ feature can be added to this version of the button thus giving greater prominence to results.

2. The Like Box

The ‘Like Box’ is another way to make your web pages more engaging, raise awareness of and generate interest in your Facebook activity, and generate more clicks of your ‘Like’ Button outside of Facebook. The ‘Like Box’ effectively slots a small Facebook section into your web page which allows your web page visitors to see how many people already like the page (and which of their friends ‘Like’ it). The ‘Like Box’ also displays your recent Facebook posts, and can be set to display a number of faces from peoples’ profile photos (by setting the ‘stream’ attribute). The more faces are displayed however the taller the ‘Like Box’ appears in the page e.g. as much as 556 pixels high with 10 faces from profiles displayed. The default width for the box is 300 pixels and border and background colours that best suit your web page can be selected.

3. The Send Button

By using the ‘Send Button’ social plug-in in your web page allows people to send private a message which contains your URL to their Facebook Friends or to the Group Wall of a specific Facebook Group. As well as the URL the message shows a title, an image and a short description. The 'Send' button and the 'Like' button can be placed next to eachother in a web page.

Making Web Pages Act Like Facebook Pages

‘Open Graph Protocol’ provides a method by which tags can be added to a web page that can effectively turn it into the equivalent of a Facebook Page. Although it’s really confined to representing profiles of leisure / entertainment e.g. movies, teams, celebrities, restaurants, Open Graph Protocol Tags allow you supply structured data to Facebook about your web page to make sure it’s shown in the best possible way within Facebook. For example, special Meta Data and a ‘Like’ can be added to your web page so that your web pages show up e.g. in the search, and when your web page ‘Like’ button is clicked your page appears in the ‘Like’s and Interests’ of the user’s Profile, and you can even publish updates to them. The more information you provide about your web page using Open Graph Protocol tags, the more opportunities you provide for your web page within Facebook.