[@kevinjohngallagher Member 16 years, 10 months ago]

What we’re suggesting Dailytalker mate, is that just because you have Facebook Connect does not mean that people will want to leave Facebook to join your forum.

People on the internet go where other people are. Aol > MSN > MySpace > Facebook. Yahoo > Hotmail > Gmail. wtc.

For people that use Facebook, and facebook connect, there is the belief that not having it is somehow stopping people from using your forums. The thing is, we have no way of knowing how correct that is, we have no stats.

What we do have is stats for people that did implement Facebook Connect on their websites, and those stats tell us that people who want to join in the discussion will do so regardless of FBconnect or not.

The largest success story of FBconnect has been the HufingtonPost, which has seen a spike in the number of people using FBconnect to use its website. Thats a positive for FBconnect for sure, but when you look at their stats they get 1 new person signing up via FBconnect for every 3000 people (*this is the published average) that see their “news story” on someone’s Facebook page/link. Almost all (over 95%) of people that use FBconnect on their site come directly from Facebook itself.

There is no data to suggest that FBconnect helps people sign-up or join-in discussions on websites. Infact, there’s alot of data to suggest that people will only use FBconnect if they come directly from facebook to your forum post, and that in the best case scenario, you’ll get 1 sign-up for every 3000 people that see what you’ve written on facebook.

I dont know about you, but nothing i write on Facebook gets seen by more than 100,000 people (for a charity news), which would result in 33 new people on that charities forums. Thats not worth the development time, nor the hassle of constantly updating.

As always, good talking to you

Merry Christmas