Search Engine Marketing Specialist Dan Cristo

Google’s Bringing Social Networking To The Masses

I was really impressed to learn about Google’s new Friend Connect product!

In short, friend connect is taking some cool things people do on social networks (upload photos, message friends, leave reviews, ratings, comments, etc) and is making them available for use on any web site. Now you might be thinking, “yeah, but I can already add that functionality through site add-on’s and widgets”. But what you can’t easily add is your FRIENDS! See, the exciting part is this, social networks like Facebook and MySpace are making their data accessible, so your friends can use your site as a social networking site, without having to recreate a new profile.

Imagine this, you’ve got 5 friends on Facebook, 5 friends on MySpace and a 5 contacts on LinkedIn who you think might be interested in a cool new site you found on, oh I don’t know… Search Engine Marketing! So instead of logging in to each network and messaging each friend, “Hey, check out this cool site I found about SEM, it’s www.DanCristo.com!”, you could simply link your Facebook account to DanCristo.com and send out an invite to your friends from there. Then your friends will get the invite, check out DanCristo.com, see the pictures you uploaded from your crazy time at SES, and they’ll all join as well. Soon your 15 friends (across 3 different networks), start using DanCristo.com’s social tools (chat, messaging, comments) and they all become friends. Then those 15 people invite a few more of their friends to join the party!

What a great way to:
A) drive traffic to your site
B) all value for visitors
C) connect friends with common interests.