Conversion Tip: Check Facebook Links to Your Site

Editor’s Note: Charles Nicholls is founder and chief technical officer of SeeWhy, a conversion and abandonment-recovery firm. His “Conversion Tip” series continues, below, with a suggestion for using Facebook’s “Recommendations” plug-in on an ecommerce site.

Facebook’s new “Recommendations” plug-in gives users personalized suggestions for pages on your site they might like. It works like this. Let’s say I visit a website that has the plug-in embedded. If my Facebook friends have also been on the site and I am logged into Facebook, I can see what content they interacted with. If none of my friends have been there or I am not logged in, I see which content has received the most “Likes.” (The two are tied together.) Think of it as a people powered “most popular” list.

What’s amazing is that you can test it out on Facebook for your site here. Simply enter in your site’s web address, and click in the gray panel somewhere (not the “Get Code” button) and it will show you the recommendations Facebook has already received for your site. This works even if you haven’t yet implemented Facebook’s “Like” based on what your Fans are saying about you on Facebook and other social media such as Twitter (but all from a Facebook perspective).

Here is Facebook’s summary of the number of Recommendations that Target has received from Facebook users.

Facebook users have “Recommendated” products from Target.com.

Target has not implemented Like or any of the other Facebook social plug-ins (yet), but note how there are already some high quality recommendations, based on fans’ sharing. Also note how the top recommendation links to hot content, and specifically a product detail page with an “add to cart button” inviting purchase.