Social Comments
From Facebook Developer Wiki
Contents |
Integrating Social Comments into your blog or website
Comments are a very powerful way for users to interact on your site, discussing the content and information you provide. Many sites already have commenting features in various forms.
With Social Comments, users bring their real identities into these conversations and can share their thoughts with their friends on your site and on Facebook. On Facebook, their comments will be discovered by other friends, the conversation will continue, and then more users are driven back to your site to view the content and engage in the public conversation.
Benefits
Social Comments can increase the authenticity and quality of conversation on your site, as well as increase traffic to your site from a user's friends who discover the content on Facebook through their friends' comments.
If you integrate social comments into your experience, you can provide several new features to increase engagement on your site, interaction, and additional comments.
Sites that have implemented comments with Facebook Connect have seen as much as 15-20% increase in users who register to comment, and even more in total comment activity.
Having the ability to show a user comments made by their friends provides a number of new ways for users to engage with your site:
- Users can filter comments by friends - which are usually the most relevant to them.
- Users can see a list of stories their friends have commented on.
- Users become more engaged and the discoverability of your content is extended.
- Increased distribution when a user posts their comment back to Facebook.
How It Works
In a comprehensive implementation of Social Comments:
- Users can log in with their Facebook account and make comments
- When a user makes a comment, they should be asked to post their comment to Facebook for additional conversation
- The user's real name (sometimes just first name) and picture from their Facebook profile are stored and displayed next to the comment to increase authenticity
- Users can view and sort comments by their friends
- Users can see all stories or content their friends have commented on across your site
Scenario 1: Surfacing Friend Comments
The user visits your site and connects with Facebook. The user browses to a story or other piece of content that allows commenting. Friend’s comments are differentiated from other comments in the user interface. The user is also given the ability to filter the comments to show only friends who have commented.
Scenario 2: Making Content Discoverable
The user visits your website or blog and connects with Facebook. The user is shown a feed of actions, including comments, the user’s friends have taken across the site.
Content that friends have commented on is generally more interesting to users. Surfacing this content creates a better user experience and increases the engagement of your site.
Scenario 3: Sharing Comments on Facebook
After a user submits a comment, a Feed form is presented, allowing the user to post the comment back to Facebook.
Scenario 4: Simple Comments with a Comments Box
The user comes to your site and wishes to comment on a piece of content. The user is presented a comment system that integrates the features of social commenting. For the developer, Facebook has made it easy to implement such a solution with the Comments Box.
Implementation
There are several ways to implement Social Comments into your site:
- Using the Facebook Comments Box
- Using a 3rd party plugin
- Integrating social comments into your existing commenting feature
Using the Facebook Comments Box
A Comments Box is a standalone social widget for any website or IFrame application. You can use it to easily allow your users to comment on your content -- whether it's for a Web page, article, photo, or other piece of content -- right on your site or application. Then the user can share the comment on Facebook as a Feed story -- both on that user's Wall and in the user's friends' streams.
Implementing a Comments Box widget is an extension of our FBML tags library. The tag that loads the Comments Box is:
Please see full instructions on the Comments Box page.
Using a 3rd party plugin
There are several plugins that have implemented Facebook Connect into their commenting system. With each of these providers, you will need to get a Facebook API key for your website and then share that API key with the provider or plugin.
Here are a few we recommend:
Integrating social comments into your existing commenting feature
TBD
Best Practices
Aggregate a user’s friends’ comments in a dashboard and allowing the user to see a list of all the comments their friends have made.
