Editor’s Note: Charles Nicholls is an ecommerce conversion expert and the founder and chief technical officer of SeeWhy, a conversion and abandonment-recovery firm. The “Conversion Tip” below continues our series from Nicholls on his ideas to convert more ecommerce visitors to buyers.
More than 100,000 sites had implemented the Facebook “Like” button within six weeks of its launch. With Like, Facebook is set to challenge Google. Like is rapidly becoming an index of content on the web, where the index is built based on mass popularity, as opposed to an arbitrary Google algorithm. The impact of this cannot be underestimated.
Facebook is the number one website in the world by page views, and it already refers more than twice the traffic to news and media sites than Google. Web users spend more time on Facebook than all the time spent on Google, Yahoo!, YouTube, Microsoft/Bing, Wikipedia and Amazon combined.
If Facebook is the next Google, then Facebook’s social plugins are your search-engine-optimization tool kit for optimizing social commerce. Of these, Facebook Like is, by far, the most important. It’s also the easiest to implement with just one line of HTML. If you don’t yet have Facebook Like on your product detail pages, it’s time to do it.