Plugging into Facebook’s Social Plugin
There was a full article in WSJ plugging the social plugin that Facebook has been pitching to businesses and website owners. The sales pitch:
For e-commerce sites, adding a “Like” button lets shoppers quickly share a product or deal with their Facebook connections, potentially encouraging them to buy the product themselves.
Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703787904575403512335975240.html#ixzz13acRpgmE
But they don’t mention that Share buttons on most websites also enable customers to do this, and in my opinion, do it better. Share buttons allow users to populate an image before they share the link with friends. If you are in any industry where visualization matters (fashion, beauty), the like button is not serving you best.
Facebook does have a solution for this, layering your Share plugin over the “like” social plugin, but other than slight tracking data, what are the benefits of doing that?
The flip side of the story is best told by “flip side stakeholder” Tim Schigel, CEO of ShareThis.
That is a change from when users share content through sharing buttons developed by other companies. Those companies, including ShareThis, which has buttons on 800,000 websites, can collect data to help sites understand their audience.
If online publishers lose data about user behavior, it could deprive them of revenue from selling advertising that is targeted to particular users, said Tim Schigel, chief executive of ShareThis. Advertisers are increasing their spending on such targeted ads faster than that for traditional ads that appear across an entire website at a given time, no matter who is visiting.
Knowing which customers share website information is valuable because it lets publishers see which users are influential, meaning they drive a lot of traffic back to their sites. “To the extent that any third party comes in and knows more and can extract more value than the publishers themselves, they can be worried,” Mr. Schigel said.
Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703787904575403512335975240.html#ixzz13adi9SQq
I love Facebook, but I don’t think the Like Social Plugin offers enough value.
