After f8: Personalized Social Plugins Now on 100,000+ Sites

Facebook Platform's tools enable you to capture the power of the social graph. On Facebook, we've seen how much more people engage with different content — such as photos, events, and games — when their friends are involved. Now, our social plugins offer you a toolkit of social functionality that you can add to your website. These personalized experiences catch the attention of your users because, without any setup or data shared, they can immediately see what their friends find most interesting and engaging on your site.

We launched Facebook Connect in late 2008 as the original initiative to help websites and other applications integrate Facebook Platform. In a little over one year, more than 250,000 sites are using our APIs to provide social context in their products. We think there are tremendous opportunities for deep integration with our APIs but, after exploring many common use cases, social plugins emerged as a lightweight way for both developers and users to benefit. Now just one line of HTML turns on the ability for users to engage with content through the Like button, and see their friends' actions through the Activity Feed and Recommendations plugins.

More than 100,000 sites have already integrated social plugins. Across various industries, people have shown that they want to interact and share and see what their friends recommend. We are excited to report some early results that website developers have shared with us:

• News: News sites have implemented social plugins to help surface individualized content for readers, and in the process seen significant increases in daily referral traffic from Facebook. For instance, Facebook referral traffic increased by 250% for ABC News and 80% for The Globe and Mail, Canada's largest-circulation national newspaper. The Globe and Mail has also found that people who have liked their Facebook Page are more engaged on their site — and comment, share, and read more.
• Movies & Video:IMDb.com has seen daily referral traffic from Facebook double, and its users have generated more than 350,000 likes. Dailymotion, one of the top 50 most-trafficked websites in the world, has seen users click the Like button tens of thousands of times per day on their site. As an example, more than 250,000 users have engaged with one of the most popular videos on Dailymotion, PIXELS by Patrick Jean, and a quarter of its views are from Facebook users.
• Sports:NHL.com, the official website of the National Hockey League, has seen an 80% increase in referral traffic from Facebook, as people interact with articles, scores and videos.
• Publishing:Scribd, a site that helps authors publish their writing, has seen their referral traffic from Facebook double as authors gain followers among groups of Facebook friends.

We think the story behind these stats is more important than the stats themselves. As we've found on Facebook, people share, read, and generally engage more with any type of content when it's surfaced through friends and people they know and trust. The results above support this. We're bringing activities that have been social in the offline world, such as sharing news, reviews, and sports enthusiasm, and giving sites a way for their users to experience their content with friends.

Beyond Social Plugins

In addition to these early successes with social plugins, many sites continue to implement Facebook into their login and core product experience. SimplyHired, a job search engine and recruitment advertising network, has found that users who log in with Facebook are twice as engaged as non-Facebook users. When people use their Facebook accounts to connect with SimplyHired, they see job openings available at companies where their friends work and at companies whose Facebook Pages they've liked.

Personera, a site helping people create personalized print materials, has also integrated with Facebook to enable users to create calendars with their Facebook photos and events, and even populate them with their friends' birthdays. They've found that Facebook users generate 50% more pageviews, spend 25% more time on site, and have a 20% lower bounce rate.

We're excited to see social plugins and our other APIs create great user experiences for users and developers. Learn more about other implementations in our showcase, and share your new implementations and how they've worked for you on the Facebook Platform Page.

Justin, who works on the Facebook Developer Network team, likes the New Orleans Saints on ESPN.com.