Wednesday, 28, Jul 2010 10:34
Facebook is making efforts to encourage online news sites to integrate with the social networking website.
The portal launched an initiative called Facebook + Media earlier this week to help media sites use Facebook to drive traffic and engagement.
It has unveiled a special media page on the social media site offering useful information to online news sites, such as data on how members engage with news articles shared on Facebook, Nieman Journalism Lab reports.
Research suggests that users are more likely to engage with news stories published early in the day or late at night and that websites see a three to five times higher click-through rate on the Like button when users see thumbnail photos of their Facebook friends.
Kim-Mai Cutler of VentureBeat says Facebook is launching this initiative to encourage more news sites to allow web users to log in using their Facebook account - figures from Gigya recently suggested that Twitter is more popular for this type of third-party log-in on news sites that its bigger rival.
"There's also compelling potential for revenue," she comments, adding: "An interesting strategy to pursue in a few years would be to build a widely distributed and highly personalised advertising network - a Facebook AdSense, if you will - on millions of media properties across the web."
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