I came across the coolest little widget from facebook for use with articles, blogs, pages, and more. It seems to look great and has some pretty incredible benefits. I’ll let you judge for yourself, but what I can see is this should not only encourage feedback, and comments, but take these comments into the social realm. Here’s a few ways that I can imagine this being of great benefit.
In my experience comments is really a great way to interact with your users. I’ve been trying to do more of that via Facebook and Twitter.
Facebook social comments for your blog or pages
I really like the idea that pages are more relevant based on your social distance, social relevance. Even SEO these days is driven more and more based on what our interests are and what our friends like (for good or for worse.) Here’s 10 ways these comments may work better than your existing comments.
1. Users will be validated – Spam reduced. Moderation levels can be managed and if you’re a developer you can even add logic to it. Comments marked as spam are hidden.
3. Social sharing - Not only will the comments live within the blog, but encouraged to share on facebook.
4. Social Relevance – the highest quality comments will be displayed first, those from friends and friends of friends (social distance) and those with the most liked or active.
5. Comments are shared - Comments are easily shared with friends or with people who like your Page on Facebook. If a user leaves the “Post to Facebook” box checked when she posts a comment, a story appears on her friends’ News Feed indicating that she’s made a comment on your website, which will also link back to your site.
6. True Integration with synchronization - Threads stay synced across Facebook and on the Comments Box on your site regardless of where the comment was made.
7. Reporting – On facebook.com/insights you can get the Daily new users, daily active users with real feedback including on the daily content shared and feedback per share.
8. Rich API – check out all of the rich ways to work with the app. Need more than facebook for comment login? Sure. Check out the developer API.
Sample code for pulling comments can be found on this blog post.
The comments for every URL can be accessed via the graph API. Simply go to: https://graph.facebook.com/comments/?ids={YOUR_URL}
9. Easy widge to integrate into existing site *including SharePoint*
Just fill in the domain, the number of comments to display, the width, and then click “get code.” Simply add the FBML to your content editor webpart and replace that webpart with the comments webpart. I recommend closing and not deleting, just in case you’re not happy with it. It also makes it easy to add back if you need to. Note it’s true it doesn’t add the count to the out of the box comments tracker, but with developers help you could remove the count. The number of comments left on a particular URL can be accessed via the Graph API.
10. Some people simply want to like a comment. Now they can!