5 tips for a viral Facebook Connect application

This the fourth article of a series of 4 articles on Facebook Connect.

This fourth and last article about Facebook Connect gives you a few tricks to gain a viral effect with your application on Facebook. This is basically done by getting friends of your users to notice your application.

1- Post updates on your users walls

Using the Stream.publish function, you can post news on your users walls that will appear on their friends newsfeeds. There are different ways to do this and it requires some extra permissions from you users if you wish to auto-publish without users approval each time. Personally, I prefer to let my users decide whether they want the application to publish on their feed and they can personalize the content of the message :

The dialog asking to publish on your wall

2- Add the friends invitation widget

The invitation widget lets your users invite friends to try your application. I used this code to get it done. Unfortunately, the restriction on how many friends you can invite per day is rather draconian.

Friends invitation dialog

3- Add the Fanbox widget

This widget is a simple snippet of code that adds a Fanbox to your page. When a Facebook user become fan of you application, it’s displayed in his friends newsfeed highlights (column on the right).

SalsaJungle.com Fanbox

4- Use Facebook comments system

Another very interesting widget that you can configure in a minute is the comment box. You get the basic comment thread (Facebook style) and the user can choose to publish his comment on his profile. And this equals more visibility for your app.

The Facebook comment box

5- Optimize the Facebook links to your site

When a Facebook user posts a link to your site in a status update or in a message to a friend, you want it to get noticed. Facebook automatically checks for images on your website to display with the link. It also figures out a description by parsing the text on page.

But instead of relying on luck, you should control all of this by using the description meta-tag and the link tag in your HTML header. You tell exactly Facebook which image and description to use when a link is made to a page of your site :

<meta name="description" content="My application description" />
<link rel ="image_src" href="http://montreal.salsajungle.com/images/logo_for_fb.gif">

Note that the image_src href has to be absolute in order to work.

That’s it! Your site should now get all the attention it deserves. Let me know in the comments if you have other ways to promote your Facebook Connect website.