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Facebook is kind of a big deal.
With two billion pieces of content shared every day on Facebook, influentials confirming that Facebook has been the largest gainer of online usage over the past three years, and recent deals with Microsoft and Google to bring public status updates to search results, getting your nonprofit organization to appear in Facebook’s news stream needs to be a marketing priority for the new year.
There’s a pretty good chance your website or blog already has a “Share on Facebook” icon or button that offers your visitors a dead-simple way to share your site with their peeps on Facebook, so that’s a great start. With a little technical savvy, you may have even figured out how you can control some of the content that appears in what’s shared to Facebook, such as the thumbnail image and the link description.
If you delight in keeping-up with tech news, you may have also heard that Facebook recently relaunched its “Share” button to include customizable text and a handy little count bubble that shows how many times a link has been shared, which is pretty nifty.
Facebook's new "Share" button with count bubble
As great as all this sharing is, though, what if you could have even more control over the content that’s shared, increase your brand’s visibility, add a call-to-action, and get started on creating a deeper level of engagement? You can do all that with Facebook Connect.
If you’ve ever logged into another website using your Facebook account, that’s an example of Facebook Connect in action: it’s a secure way for you to authorize other websites to access your identity and connections on Facebook without needing to hand over your login information to yet another third party. With your consent, Facebook Connect also allows websites to access a user’s news stream to publish content—and that’s where things get exciting.
If you have a website where visitors complete actions—like to donate, enroll, volunteer, become a member, RSVP, request information, sponsor, etc.—make sure you provide them with the opportunity to tell people what they just did. On the page that thanks people for their donation, for example, encourage them to tell their friends on Facebook that they just did something great to support your organization. Similarly, make sure that they can easily share their enthusiasm after they’ve just signed-up for your program. You can do this by adding a button to these pages that leverages Facebook Connect to share a chunk of pre-defined content.
Implementing Facebook Connect can be a bit tricky, so I’ll take you through five steps to get it done. With a bit of geeky self-reliance and motivation, you can totally do this yourself without the assistance of a Web developer. [click to continue…]
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