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.