On Facebook’s Place App

Facebook are launching a Foursquare-style app that allows Facebook users to “check-in” to physical locations, sometimes automatically. The feature will allow friends to see where you are wit the intention being to develop a range of games or social apps that take advantage of location-based information. For example, advertisers can provide discounts for check-ins against products and services. You can also imagine check-in parties given Facebook’s past with spontaneous party organisers. 

My prediction around Facebook Places is that it will be a massive success. Geo-location is the next big thing around mobile apps, a market that’s already set to surpass the desktop for web-browsing activity. 2010 is the year all about the app and people will be attracted to the cleverness of geolocation.

It will take some pretty horrific horror stories about Places privacy going wrong to really derail Facebook’s growth in this area. The operation is already more than aware how damaging privacy concerns can be following recent media coverage and subsequent changes to the usability of privacy settings.

As a Facebook user you will have control about what geolocation information you share and you really must be a grade-A idiot if you share your location with the entire world and then wonder why you were burgled whilst you were checked in at work or are being followed by weird stalkers.

What does Facebook Places mean for politics? Watch this space. I’m thinking campaign-trail based apps, surgery check-ins, protests and demos.

Facebook ‘Like’ button for your website

As you can see at the top of this post there’s a “like” button for Facebook that allows you to tag this post as something you’ve enjoyed reading and share it on your Facebook profile for your friends to see. The idea is to enable websites to connect into the Facebook platform to allow them to tap in to the vast traffic potential it could offer.

We’re also social beings who tend to remain friends with people who have similar interests - the chances are if you see that your friend has ‘liked’ something you are probably going to be interested in it too.

Dropping this kind of functionality in to a blog is easy. You need to pop this code somewhere before the closing </body> HTML tag in your post template:

<div id="fb-root"></div>
<script>
  window.fbAsyncInit = function() {
    FB.init({appId: 'your app id', status: true, cookie: true,
             xfbml: true});
  };
  (function() {
    var e = document.createElement('script'); e.async = true;
    e.src = document.location.protocol +
      '//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js';
    document.getElementById('fb-root').appendChild(e);
  }());
</script>

Then you can utilise a wizard over on Facebook to customise your ‘like’ button and adjust it’s width and other settings. Be careful to put the right value in the URL field to make sure that users will ‘like’ the permalink to your post and not the URL to your home page instead.

Once you generate the code it will look something like this:

<fb:like href="{Permalink}" font="trebuchet ms"></fb:like>

You can paste this in to the spot in your post template where you want the functionality to appear. In our case it’s just after the title of the blog post.

That covers the basics, but you will want to find out some stats about this ‘like’ button especially if you don’t want to have to manually check your pages for responses.

Go to Facebook again and register for Insights for your Domain to enable some basic reporting. You will need to add some meta code to your blog template to confirm ownership, but once done you’ll be able to see what links on your site have been ‘liked’ and shared between Facebook users.

Image: Like/Dislike Stamps from Nation.

PS: The above technique is provided without warranty. We can support, however, if you get stuck. Drop us a line.

Facebook’s 500 Million

We’d like to believe that there’s not a politician, lawyer or investment banker* out there who doesn’t realise the power of social media when it comes to their own campaign, product, service or brand.  Instead of harping on about the virtues we’ll leave it to fellow Twittering and Tumbling politico Steven Dent who’s got the stats and a write-up.

Part of the services that Roused will be offering in the near future is social media management.

• We’ll provide you with some kick-ass tools, techniques and training to get the most out of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and any other social network that comes along.
• We’ll also be rolling out social media integration in to all of the sites we manage and you’ll soon be able to log in to update your blogs and websites using your Facebook and/or Twitter account.
• Our clients will benefit from our support in establishing social media campaigns, such as to improve fundraising and increase membership, where applicable.

* We picked politicians, lawyers and investment bankers as these are people from the 3 markets we operate in.