Cenetrix Blog

Facebook’s recent launch of their new open graph protocol enabling users to recommend and like individual web pages opens up an interesting debate.  Whereas the old fan pages were created to engage fans within Facebook, the new mechanism enabled by open graph takes the interaction outside of Facebook, but allows the external web page to appear inside a social space.

When adding the open graph implementation for the “like” feature, it is possible to create multiple pages and effectively fans against each page. If you already have a fan page, adding a “like” button will create a new pages within Facebook and therefore multiple places for interacting with your customers.  For small to medium sized companies with potentially limited resources and budget this can pose a challenge as consolidating fans into one way to communicate needs some knowledge of API’s.

If a brand decides to interact with their fans using the new “web page” page, then it does mean for particularly active people on Facebook that updates would disappear off their wall quickly.

I can see a case for both external and fan pages in Facebook, but they really need to integrate the two.  This would allow a particular brand to have multiple web pages associated to a particular fan page or brand.  From a review of the developer documentation it appears the only way is to create an application, but then you are stuck using API call using Graph API to send updates.  As the application can be tied to a particular page, it does get round the multiple page issue. This is an area Facebook need to work on.

This poses some questions.

Is open graph set to replace fan pages of old? Do you continue to invest in your fan pages?

What does open graph mean for SEO? We are already moving away from a pure play on keywords and to leverage authority as a quality signal, now we potentially have another signal.  This is certainly an area to watch as an SEO.

Are Facebook looking to compete with google? A reasonable question, as they now have data about real web pages and can take a more authoritative view on a clean set of search results.  Facebook also have something google don’t, personal information anchored to we pages.

Will Google be interested in taking a feed from Facebook, and add it to their quality signals? Is Facebook looking to expand it’s search position?

Will Facebook look to augment bing’s search results if not with Google?

Regardless of the underlying agenda, some fundamentals are good.  Open Graph implements semantic principles, further supporting the semantic web.  Facebook open graph are very easy to configure which will massively improve take-up.

It’s early days with open graph, but time will tell with the impact it will have with fan pages for B2C brands. From my own experience I can already see potential conflicts.

Web analytics vendors need also pay attention as many have recently announced Facebook measurement solutions.  These may already need to change as there is another variable to consider.  Arguably it does directly attach sentiment to a brand and page, so perhaps Facebook have just made lives a little easier. I’m off to Omniture’s Summit in May where they are launching their Facebook measurement solution, so it will be interesting to hear their position.

One thing is for sure, this is the start of an interesting chapter with Facebook.  Here at Cenetrix we are already integrating open graph and semantic web details into our websites.  Anything that makes a customers life easy to share information and supports a richer experience embracing quality of experience with brands is a good thing.  From a personal perspective I like to see that people have positively rated a brand, so Facebooks “like” features is another signal to the customer to trust a brand.  In my view this is complimentary to reviews and testimonials.