Open Graph is Facebook’s new protocol which allows 3rd party websites and webapps to connect user activity on-site with user activity on Facebook. Through defining “objects” (piece of content) and “actions” (watch, read, listen etc) Open Graph enables your product to become an integral part of the user’s and their friend’s Facebook activity.
Through integration with the Open Graph API, third party content appears to users as updates through the timeline, news feed and ticker — allowing users to interact with content directly through Facebook, while observing the activities of their friends and receiving social recommendations accordingly.
This stuff is gold dust for any SEOs/Developers working with sites that regularly produce or host engaging online content/resources - be that blog posts, videos, apps, images, informational resources or any content form which involves active engagement from the user base. If you’ve got any sort of engaged community that typically visits your site on a regular/semi-regular basis — you need to be thinking about building an open graph app in order to catapult that engagement to a new level and really begin to see ROI from social media. It’s not complicated to do and to explain the whole system to us, Distilled have brought in an expert.
Mixcloud’s Mat Clayton, a frequent speaker at distilled conferences popped into the office to give us the low-down on Open Graph — what it is, how it works and how you can use it to increase traffic and user engagement.
Here are the topics and resources covered in the video:
1. What is Open Graph?
Mat covers the basics of Open Graph, explaining “Objects” and “Actions” concept and how some of the biggest sites in the world are using it to improve social media ROI. For more information, Facebook have a great page Explaining the Open Graph and a page Explaining how the ticker works with Apps.
2. Enabling your App for Social Graph
Mat explains the process of creating an app, some of the technical elements involved, and how you need to think of the Open Graph concepts as relating to elements of your content. For further reading, check out Facebook’s excellent tutorial for building an Open Graph App. To start creating your app, you will need to register at Facebook Developers Center
3. Social Plugins with Open Graph
Facebook’s social plugins, such as Facepile are the core of building functionality into your site, which encourages users to link up their activity on your site with their activities on Facebook. Mat explains the conversion value of these social plugins with Open Graph functionality.
4. Authenticated Referrals
Mat explains what authenticated referrals are and how the system helps to dramatically improve brand awareness and engagement from users who may have never even visited your site prior to discovery through Facebook.
With less than six weeks until LinkLove 2012 commences, we thought you might want a little insight in to what you can expect from this years line-up. We’ve been chatting and working closely with our speakers over the last couple of weeks. They are now busy wading and mining through data, testing theories and preparing hard to bring you the very latest tactics for link building. Here’s how the sessions are shaping up so far. Brace yourself, it’s going to be killer:
The process of link building sucks. We’ve all spent the hours slogging away, trying desperately to get a link from site after site, jealous of those “fun industries” where links simply pour in. Well, no more. Content can earn links in any niche – it just needs to be the right content, targeted at the right audience, promoted in the right way. In this presentation, Rand will walk through a process for doing just that – and winning the link battle through content that scales, engages and out-earns link “building” efforts every time.
Not all months were created equal. Businesses’ calendars vary through the year; based on their market, their own stage of growth and the flow of news. With careful planning, you can use all of this to your advantage. Without the planning, you’ll never achieve the results you want at your most critical times of year. Rhea is bringing detailed tips and ideas for getting the best results throughout the year.
We love science at Distilled. Branko brings science. He’s going to be educating us all on the ways he applies scientific techniques to his work and, in particular, showing us his methodology for determining what kinds of social sharing actually bring links. Armed with this knowledge, you will be able to make content and promotion plans based on actual data rather than gut feel and guess work.
Kris has never been shy about pointing out that there are greyhat tactics that still work. We know, however, that we are never going to recommend that kind of thing to our clients – and nor do most of you. We’ve asked Kris to share the things about an industry or set of search results that make him turn towards the light. What beats grey? What can you and your clients do to dominate enough that the greyhats stay away from your space?
It’s all very well building links to non-commercial content, but you need to round out your plans with links to your money pages as well. There’s no-one better to present the best ways of getting links to product pages, category pages and the like than Adam Audette.
Wil’s on a mission to provide you with the most actionable advice. He won’t be satisfied unless more delegates implement more of his ideas than any other speaker. He’s shared a few of the tips with us already – and there are some blinders. Building targets, building relationships and building links – it’s all there.
No link is impossible. Jane has built links from the hardest link targets on the web. Want to identify and nail the hardest golden links? Jane’s going to show you how.
You don’t always have to reinvent the wheel. In fact, Ross would argue that you should normally be standing on the shoulders of giants. Understand what has worked (and how!) in your industry, for your competitors and for others with similar profiles – then recreate it, only better. You can get to #1 this way as long as you innovate on top of what others are doing and scale it better.
Link building tools are improving and proliferating rapidly. John’s going to show us the state of the art tools – from the freebies to those at enterprise level. He’ll then show us all how to recreate the benefits of the expensive enterprise tools on a constrained budget.
How and why we link to pages is changing. New technologies change our definition of “link-worthy” and new social tools change the way we recommend pages. Tom is going to talk about the attributes of pages that get links and how you can build links with smart development.
The brothers are giving a pair of presentations split between London and Boston (the provisional plan is to make the other half available to each audience on video). They are going to be presenting their “methodology for fame” – the recipes and checklists they believe propel businesses from good to great online.
The stuff Mike is going to present is just as cool as you would expect. It’s currently so secret, I can’t even give a hint as to what it is. OK – just a little hint – making outreach effective – in his own unique style.
*Subject to change
Too excited to wait? Here’s some Pro tips to keep you fuelled:
Add these tips to your site
Network. Now.
Remember Tom’s pro tip about building relationships? Well we’ve set up a dedicated group on LinkedIn for you to network before, during and after LinkLove 2012 with fellow attendees on both sides of the Atlantic. Use this group to gain links, ask questions, and network. We’ll be keeping this group updated regularly with more information, so keep an eye out.
Still not registered your place?
Don’t miss out on the only specialist link building conference around. We’re set to sell out, so register your place now, and if you need any more convincing on why you should attend LinkLove 2012, I urge you to read this post and watch the video:
Need buy-in from your boss? This ROI story should just about cut-it. Thank you David, we are stoked to have been one of the reasons for your companies amazing success. We’d love to hear about any other success stories and achievements which have directly stemmed from attending our conference. Get in touch @distilled #linklove.
Learnch: get involved. Educate.
Here at Distilled we have an internal meme for learning at lunch, we’ve taken that into our conferences and now run topic tables during the lunch break. You can sign up to a table when you register on the morning of the conference. We’ll have some of our consultants hosting, plus some guest hosts. We have a couple of tables that we are opening to the floor, so what would you like to discuss? Do you want to host a table? Get in touch and we’ll see what we can do.
Hope to see you all there! Oh and don’t forget about the FREE site clinics, one on one time with our consultants. Did I mention they were free? Email events@distilled.net to register your appointment now.
For 2012 I made a couple of New Year’s resolutions.
I’m not going to lie, most have fallen by the wayside already – however one which seems to have stuck (for now at least) is reading more books. First up – Meatball Sundae by Seth Godin.
I figured I really ought to read this – not just because everyone else already has done, but because whilst I don’t think SEO is dead – I do think that our remit as SEOs is changing. The most common question we’re asked as SEOs is ‘Why doesn’t my site rank?’ – and I’m guessing our most common response (technical issues aside) is ‘No one’s linking to you.’
However that response, whilst true, is often a symptom of a much bigger issue – namely that the site doesn’t deserve to rank.
There are many reasons why a site might not deserve to rank – a product or service that’s undifferentiated, lacks a USP, is un-targeted, the site looks like a MySpace page, there’s no content (I could go on).
Perhaps we ought to answer like this instead -
“Your product / service and site content is unremarkable. Your site doesn’t speak to your consumer. You’ve failed to engage with your audience.”
Even if it’s true, it’s difficult to say in polite company – it’s like calling someone’s baby ugly.
I often get asked about my view on growing teams and managing people. I love chatting with would-be entrepreneurs and up-and-coming managers about the bits and pieces I’ve learnt. I don’t consider myself an expert by any stretch of the imagination – I had barely managed anyone before Distilled – but I often feel that I benefit from putting my thoughts down in writing.
While it’s not strictly on-topic for all of our audience, the regularity with which I’m asked about this stuff definitely qualifies for FAQ status among owners of agencies and consultancies. I hope you find it useful.
I’ve spent quite a bit of time recently working with clients on their content strategies for 2012. Its something I’ve been keen to evangelise and get them to invest resource into, some clients have been harder than others to convince! I can see why its sometimes a hard thing to buy into, but I firmly believe that having a solid content strategy in place is essential for the majority of sites we work with. Tom wrote this post on content marketing yesterday which I’d urge you to go and read.
Why companies struggle with content marketing
Two of the common problems that many companies have with content production are -
Resource to create content – many do not have time or specialist writers in-house
They lack ideas of what content they can create or their industry is “boring”
There are more, but these are probably the consistent ones that I hear.
It puzzles me that the SEO industry and the content marketing industries rarely talk to each other. While there is some modest overlap, by and large, the two worlds keep to themselves on blogs, twitter, and even with having separate conferences. This strikes me as a missed opportunity for both industries. I believe there’s a lot we can learn from each other and in this post and more over the coming weeks, I’d like to bridge the gap between the two industries and foster communication and discussion between SEOs and content marketers.
You may recognize me from Twitter or other SEO communities around the web like SEOmoz. If not, nice to meet you! I run Evolving SEO in Massachusetts. Just like to thank Tom Critchlow for offering me the opportunity to guest post on the Distilled site. This is my first guest post ever. I hope I fulfill your expectations!
Tom Suggested I Write About This Google Search For “Fave”
Sometimes, it can be overwhelming and difficult to look at a new site and know where to start.
Do I got straight into the code? Do I navigate around? Should I go straight into their backlink profile. I JUST DON’T KNOW!
Although these are all important, they may not give you a high-level understanding of the site and a clear picture of how the project should proceed. To tackle the “deer-in-the-headlights” approach I’ve put together 5 simple steps that will help you identify some common and crucial problems that are made. These steps are especially useful when you being speaking with a potential client and they want to know how you can help.
As part of our ongoing effort to share the knowledge we’re giving away a free SEO video every month for our subscribers.
Recorded in crystal clear HD format at our leading industry conferences, we have over 50 hours of some of the brightest SEOs out there (Rand Fishkin, Will Critchlow, Wil Reynolds, Richard Baxter, Michael Gray, Rhea Drysdale and Bob Rains to name but a few) giving away their best tips, tricks and research.
Check out the trailer below for a taster of what these videos contain:
So all you need to do is register your details below and you’ll get 3 videos in the first month, and then we’ll send you a fresh new one every month from then on. Nice!
This week at the Distilledathon in London, our all-company meeting taking place as you read this (if you read it before January 28th, 2012), we have a day we’re calling a “Ship-a-thon”. Inspired by hackathons across the world, we’re aiming to make waves and ship some awesome products to make Distilled, and the SEO community, better.
To that end, today we have announced DistilledU.
(logo possibly in progress)
You can sign up here to know when we launch it to the public. But let me tell you a bit more about DistilledU. more >
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