Growing Your Facebook and Twitter Followers through Social Automation

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Finally, there’s a way to grow your social network, increase engagement and site registrations without having to Tweet and Facebook 24/7.

Through a relatively new type of service called a user management platform for the social web, you can invite visitors to your destination website to use their Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, MySpace or Open ID credentials to register or log in when they visit. So rather than have to fill out some lengthy form, they can log in with one click.

When they do, you get the opportunity to capture and keep much of their profile data and check out their social graph.

The result is a huge increase in site registrations, a much more engaged community and nine times the referral traffic.

In this episode, Tore Steen, VP, Marketing and Business Development at Janrain (acquired by Akamai) and former VP of Business and Corporate Development for WebTrends explains the concept of a user management platform for the social web on non-technical terms, makes the business case for implementing the service and the future of marketing on the social web.

SHOW NOTES

01:24 — An explanation of the Janrain user management platform for the social media, which offers a way for visitors to your website to use their Facebook, Twitter and 14 other social networking credentials to register for your website.

03:03 — The benefit of having visitors use Facebook or Twitter credentials to register when they visit an organization’s destination website.

04:14 — The top three preferred identity providers today in order of importance are Google, Facebook and Yahoo, but business-oriented sites tend to draw more Linkedin registrations and visitors to consumer oriented-sites tend to use their Facebook identity to login.

05:24 — The richest profile and social graph data that a website can receive is from a Facebook user, because Facebook has the most information because of their “Like” button and the information user’s store on theirs profile page.

Other identity providers are currently jockeying to find a way to capture and provide a more detailed portrait of their users.

06:43 — There are ways to determine who the most influential people who’ve “Liked” your organization on Facebook are. You can see what other brands they’ve liked and when they publish to your Facebook Page. Â On average, for every Facebook Page post that someone makes on your Wall, there are an average of nine inbound referrals generated to your Facebook Page from that person’s network of friends.

Looking at whoever brings the most referrals to your website is a great way to see who your most influential Facebook friends are.

08:02 — If you’re using a user management platform for the social web, every time someone uses their Facebook credentials to sign into your site, you get a list of their friends so you get an understanding of their social graph. On the Mahalo site, if you use Google to authenticate, you can bring your address book and invite your friends through an automated pick list.

09:18 — Given that Facebook is known for random terms of service changes, organizations can mitigate the risk of relying solely on Facebook for access to their constituents by capturing and storing the registration data in their own contact management database as well.

11:48 — Making it easy to share web pages or content was the rage a couple of years ago, but today, it’s about making it easy for users to share activities or the ways they participate online. CitySearch uses Janrain to allow visitors to post a link to the restaurant reviews they write to their Facebook newsfeed, driving richer engagement.

Other activities that could become advocacy or public relations opportunities through integrated sharing include e-commerce transactions, white paper downloads, charitable donations or any other online activity that someone might want to share with their friends and followers online.

12:48 — Responding to the growing interest of their customers in fortifying their presence in the mobile environment, Janrain optimized their user experience for a variety of mobile browers first, so smart phone users would have a positive experience logging in with a handheld device.

They also released a software developer’s kit to embed the Janrain user management platform for identity management into custom apps. Today, Janrain supports iPhone and will release support for Droid in the fourth quarter of 2010.

13:57 — Because they’ve seen greater adoption of apps by Droid users, Janrain decided to offer Droid support next, though they intend to eventually support Blackberry as well.

15:24 — The old metrics were quantity of site traffic, time spent on site and passive page views. But the new metrics on the social web are about quality of site traffic, interactions that occur and active sharing. It’s a shift from measuring traffic, to measuring actions. Â The easiest way to calculate the ROI of a user management platform for the social web is to compare the number of unique visitors that registered prior to deployment, to the number of registrations that occur after deployment.

16:25 — The second new metric to monitor is the referral traffic from the social sharing feature and see how many of those referred visits result in some sort of transaction, be it a CPM, e-commerce or lead generation.

17:49 — User management platforms do require a web developer to get up and running, but the products have thus far been largely embraced by web development community, because it solves a very specific need for marketers, and insulates developers from having to innovate a solution from scratch.

19:06 — Janrain does have WordPress and Drupal plugins available, but they require some coding to get up and running. They’ve also partnered with Kick Apps and integrated their user management platform into that solution as well.

21:24 — End

Photo by Franck V. on Unsplash

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