New changes to Facebook announced at last week’s f8 conference in San Francisco have caused quite a stir in the online world…first, let me provide some detail on their changes then we can delve into the controversy…and above all, how it could potentially affect SEO.
Basically, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg articulated a new vision for the social network and of Internet search in general – that ultimate vision is for a more social Internet replacing links between pages with relationships between people and things where information is shared between Facebook and other sites.
Facebook formally announced the addition of three features: social plug-ins, open graph protocol and graph API. The first two are more for programmers but today we’ll discuss social plug-ins since it will have the most practical impact on anyone who uses the Internet and Facebook in particular.
Facebook is the sun and other sites are the planets
This analogy is a simplified version of explaining Facebook’s vision that began two years ago with its release of Facebook Apps and then Facebook Connect which is now evolving into a larger initiative making Facebook the web’s hub.
Anyone who uses Facebook is aware of their social plug-ins – Like, Activity and Recommendations are the big three. Facebook’s new capabilities now allow websites to add a “Like” button on any page on their website, essentially making a Facebook “fan” page without actually creating one on the network. If a site visitor click “Like” on a webpage and they’re logged in to Facebook, it will be transmitted back to the social network and added to their profile and feed.
For example, the online review site Yelp is adding “Like” buttons to all of its local business profile pages. Say you click “Like” on a restaurant’s Yelp page and that information is transmitted back to your profile.
Whatever your “likes” are (a store, a band, a movie, etc.), they become part of your online identity and thus accessible to the publishers and sites in the “open graph” that Facebook envisions.
The other plugins – Activity and Recommendations – help make third party publisher sites more “social” by showing what your friends like or are doing on a respective website.
And now for the controversy
As you can probably see where this is going, many professionals in the online world question Facebook’s commitment to privacy with these changes. Let’s say you click the “like” button on your favorite restaurant’s Yelp page.
This information will now be on your Facebook profile and accessible to the particular business you like. They will be able to take your information, share it and use it to base their marketing strategy. The problem is this – all sharing of information needs to be authorized by the user and it won’t be now.
You have to consider whether you want people you’ve never met and probably will never meet to see what your tastes are and use that information to their benefit without your knowledge – certainly a troubling notion indeed when you think about it.
That may be okay if Facebook users are aware of it and can decide for themselves how much information they want to share but it’s clear that most will probably have no idea what’s going on and that’s where much of the concern lies.
Facebook will eventually be sitting on mountains of data – favorite restaurant, places, musicians, movies and more – that will be structured and associated with its millions of users. In the future, all of that public identity information will become available to Bing and perhaps Google.
How will this affect my online marketing?
Well, that remains to be seen in many respects. On the surface, this may seem like a great way to plug in to the nearly ½ billion and growing subscribers to Facebook. Facebook’s vision is to transform the web from a Google-centric internet comprised of billions of unrelated documents and sites to one where social relationships and affiliations serve as the connective tissue in a vast network.
Only time will tell how this will play out but one reply on a WebMasterWorld thread says that if you do SEO, you should start learning how to do SEO in Facebook. And it’s not your typical SEO where you handle links. Instead, you work with advertising that targets particular demographics of your target market.
We’ll certainly stay on top of how these changes affect the SEO/online marketing world and share these insights with you as they become available. In the mean time, check back with us soon to learn how you can opt-out of Facebook’s new apparatus and learn more about their other two new features.
