Grown Up Thinking

Facebook’s Open Graph protocol was announced back in April. It allows just about any web property to incorporate basic Facebook social functionality. It’s still very new, and the most basic implementation of it, the “Like” button, is popping up everywhere from branded e-commerce sites, to movie microsites, to blogs and mainstream news outlets.

It’s the easiest way to layer social functionality onto existing brand properties – the low hanging fruit in almost any social strategy. However, because it’s so new, I often find myself having to justify this tactic to clients a lot more than other social tactics. The lack of solid results around major implementations of the Like button doesn’t help the situation.

The three most common questions brands are asking about Open Graph plug-ins, and my simplified responses are:

1. Will people actually click on these buttons? Yes, they’re doing it in droves. Look at the Levi’s store figures. Thousands of people have liked each individual product in their store. The Like button is a familiar feature to everyone on Facebook, but now it’s available elsewhere.

2. Does anyone care when their friend Likes something? Yes, “Liking” is a common practice among the 500-million users of Facebook, and so are similar actions on other social networks. Consumers rely on the sharing of information and “Liking” brands/products/people/content in order to express their personality, interests, and personal brand to their friends and followers.

3. What kind of results can we expect to see from this? Every “Like” can amplify your value proposition through Facebook at an accelerated rate than previous tactics. It helps to build your brand’s community faster. It knocks down barriers between your owned digital properties and the primary social network your consumers use. And of course, at the most basic level, it’s acting as a recommendation engine to make it easier than ever for consumers to endorse your products (this is a recipe for awesome sauce, since friends are highly influential in consumers’ purchase decisions).

As of this week, we have some powerful new data in our arsenal to illustrate the tangible benefits of implementing social functionality outside of social networks. Data from Steve Madden e-commerce site and email marketing firm GetResponse provide us solid figures that actually answer all three of the above questions in terms of ROI and consumer influencer.

First up, it looks like Steve Madden’s implementation of the Facebook “Like” feature into its mobile commerce site increased traffic by 30 percent overnight. This is huge. Read more at Mobile Marketer.

Second, when it comes to enhancing email marketing, it turns out that adding social sharing elements to emails will result in an average increase of 30-55% in click-through-rates. The variance is proportional to the number of sharing methods included in emails. Three different sharing options resulted in the highest average CTR – 55%. Learn more about this study from GetResponse’s report.

I’m excited to see more results pour in now that Open Graph is being implemented across the board for so many brands. Keep your eyes peeled!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010 at 1:49 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.