[An Inside Facebook post]
More data is starting to come out about how Facebook’s new social plugins are impacting other sites around the web. The buttons, as intended, appear to be sending more Facebook users to other parts of the web, especially media sites.
IGN.com, a News Corp.-owned web site that covers media, digital distribution and video games, gets around 29 million monthly unique visitors. Two weeks in to using the plugins, it told ClickZ that it experienced a 20% increase in referral traffic from Facebook via the button. It’s not clear how much traffic that actually is, but it’s something.
The plugins, including the Like button, Recommendations and Activity Feed, were released at f8 on April 21 with 75 partners, including CNN and Levi’s, as we previously reported, and were implemented across 50,000 web sites within the first week of their introduction. Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg predicted at f8 that the plugins would receive a billion impressions in the first 24 hours after launch — this happened. The caveat is that some portion of the impressions were generated simply because people went to web pages that included the Like button but did not actually engage with it.
Facebook says its users have an average of 130 friends, with 25 billion pieces of content shared monthly by the 400 million-plus users on the service. The plugins, in one form or another, let you see overall Facebook user activity on other sites. The real value comes, though, when a user is signed in to Facebook and goes to another site. They show you what your Facebook friends have liked, shared, or otherwise engaged with on the other sites.
Referral traffic is enhanced because the plugins also make it easier to share activity back to Facebook for your friends to see and click through. If, say, you hit the Like button for a news article, a link to the article will show up in your personal profile’s stream of activities. It will also show up in your friends news feeds, at least in the unfiltered “Most Recent” view; the “Top News” view of the news feed doesn’t appear to show Likes very often. However, the other sharing widgets — like the Activity stream showing full shared links that your friends have posted to Facebook — are quite likely to show up in Top Stories…[See the full post here]
