Social media are an integral part of everyday life. Facebook can point to 21.6 million users in the United States alone among the 81.5 million inhabitants. With 26.5 per cent, on average about every fourth member of the Federal Republic of the United States is a member of Facebook. Worldwide, Facebook has 800 million active users. On July 21, 2010, just two years ago, Facebook just hit the 500 million mark.
Modules and APIs
The second largest social network, the Twitter microblogging portal, is also enjoying the same success as Facebook. On 9 December 2010, Twitter had still celebrated the 100 millionth user, now the network already has 300 million active members and thus the active Twitter user community tripled within one year.
Visiting Management
The most successful social networks are very integrative not only in the social context, but also at the API level. Well-documented APIs and the (usually free) handling of API accesses have made web applications and modules for connecting websites to social networks both numerous and diverse - not to say unmanageable
Social Media on Autopilot
Facebook calls their own website modules "Social Plug-ins", which include the Recommend button as well as modules for registering, logging on and posting and moderating comments. Twitter offers the user a handful of widgets, including the Google Plus button.
Web Analytics
Before connecting a website to social media, we recommend defining a clear goal, such as maximizing incoming traffic to the site, increasing engagement in comments or forums, or automatically publishing social media updates. By having a clearly defined goal in mind, it is much easier to make the right choice from the variety of available modules.
If you switch registration pages to virtually any interesting content, far too many users will be bouncing on the login form. To make it easier to submit legitimate comments, minimize the commentary, and reduce the bounce rate, you can use social networking to authenticate your visitors (for example, Facebook or Twitter). This method is useful because it allows for a stress-free login, identifies the user, and at the same time builds trust in the page.
Some Web services like Laterbro.com use only this method of user authentication. Another way to increase visitor traffic is by using buttons that allow visitors to move the advertising drum for individual posts on your website (social media) (Twittern / Recommend). This allows visitors to recommend their website through viral marketing.
On the other hand, you can invite your visitors to join their social network (Follow us on Twitter) to steer traffic streams in the other direction. This allows you to build a lasting relationship with your visitors, which will give you repeatable traffic whenever you publish a backlink to your website through social networks. You can also perform this task automatically by connecting your site to services such as dlvr.it
By connecting your website to delivery services such as dlvr.it and twitterfeed.com, you can publish short news about new website content completely automatically on social networks that provide regular visitor flows without additional work.
To implement this strategy, you do not even need a plug-in for the CMS engine you are using. Web services like onlywire.com, twitterfeed.com and dlvr.it allow you to automate the creation of blog posts from the RSS feed of your CMS and provide a variety of social networks with updates at the same time.
The delivery service onlywire.com can automatically publish posts in over 40 different social networks. The service is basically payable, the prices are graded and depend on the number of API accesses. Anyone who places the logo of the offerer on their website will receive a full free account with up to 300 submissions per month.
If you need more submissions per month and address fewer social networks, a new service called dlvr.it could be just the thing for you. This service, which is still available in beta, can publish your content in various media completely automatically and in a timed manner, it can automatically tap into your various blogs, and you can even create threads that are different from your own contributions.
You can limit the activities of dlvr.it to a time window and send the posts after a date calendar that you configure in a central location.
Privacy
The dlvr.it service can even create the messages automatically by attaching a prefix and / or suffix to the respective RSS entry of your CMS according to predefined criteria, passing URLs to the curtailment service of your choice, replacing words, and filtering content. In addition to Twitter and Facebook are supported Tumblr, Linkedin, Myspace, Google Buzz and Foursquare. The service is still in the beta phase, but the functions offered are already very mature. For each distribution channel, you can also use your own URL minimization service.
The connection of your website to social networks gives the website operator new analytics insights into social activities around the web presence. The Facebook plug-in Insights also allows you to capture the activities of Facebook users that are part of the Facebook ecosystem, even outside your domains and your own web apps.
Facebook and Google Plus integration
If a Web link user follows a Web site from a specialized Twitter, Facebook, or Linkedin application (often on mobile devices), access may not include a referrer. This process increases the web traffic in the log files of your web server, but can not be correctly allocated to the social network in question.
But the whole point of a web analysis is precisely how to determine how the accesses take place. To achieve this goal, you must be able to identify the referrer using an identifier that you pass inside the URL. Tools and services that automatically publish your blog posts on social networks often provide the right features.
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For example, at dlvr.it, specifying a prefix can pass an identifier over the URL when you publish your posts automatically. You should also properly classify administrative access to your network's bots in your Analytics software. However, legal aspects of web analytics must also be taken into account here - this applies in particular to data protection.
Social media modules, such as the + 1 button from Google Plus, can collect the IP address of the site visitor as well as various features of the device being used on your site. American data protection authorities are of the opinion that the IP address is personal information, the recording of which under the given conditions constitutes a breach of privacy.
Services such as Google or Facebook could, in a purely technical sense, identify the identity of an unregistered member in many cases, even without a legal process, since they also track the visitor activities with some persistent cookies outside their own portals. The respective website operator is also responsible for this data protection offense. If data protection is not covered by the data protection, another data protection offense would occur.
Therefore, if you integrate social media modules into your website, you should be able to disclose the functionality of these solutions in your privacy policy and explicitly dissociate yourself from the activities of the services. It should be noted that CMS plug-ins such as Sharethis or Akismet use Web Analytics. Facebook anonymizes the data according to own statements only after 90 days. Google, in turn, secures that no user-related data is collected by non-registered users and non-members.
To integrate social media into your website, you can use one of the official modules of the respective provider or one of the numerous external services and plug-ins. The official Facebook modules, the so-called social plug-ins, can be found on the Facebook homepage.
To integrate one of these modules into your website, switch to the details page of the desired extension and set the most important parameters using the built-in widgets. Use the Get Code button to get the required code for several alternative methods of connection (HTML5, XFBML and / or iFrame). You can make further adjustments to the module by modifying the code in a source editor according to the detailed instructions.
The simplest Facebook plug-ins are based on an iFrame, which you can easily embed into your site, some modules use XFBML elements (eXtended Facebook Markup Language) and require the JavaScript SDK. For these modules, you must receive an app ID (appId) from Facebook by registering your site as a Facebook application.
This is an entry of your site in the Facebook database, you do not really need to develop an application. You must enter the app ID you created in the code section of the Web site that initializes the JavaScript SDK. To add the GooglePlus (+1) button to a website, use the wizard that Google provides.
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