Released Facebook 'Like' Button on ninemsn Sports

On the eve on the Fifa World Cup 2010, my team at work just released a powerful new slideshow tool (Backend built using Silverlight) to let our content producers pump out new slideshows at a very fast rate. I cant show you guys the back end but the front end looks like this.

http://wwos.ninemsn.com.au/worldcupslideshow/92676/opening-concert-in-soweto.slideshow

This is essentially a very simple slideshow but I've been pushing for as much Social Network integration as possible. There is a comment tool which has got full Facebook Graph and Twitter integration (You cant see it above as it is not enabled on this slideshow - i'll post a review once we have a slidehsow with it enabled), and I've also integrated the Facebook 'Like' button social plugin as shown below:

And once a user 'Likes' the slideshow it appears on their Facebook wall like so:

I really wanted to integrate this as i believe that this year's World Cup is going to see the most content and media spread online virally than any other sporting event in history. So people are going to be 'sharing' articles, photos and slideshows, videos and other interactive goodies at an amazing rate and i wanted to give users of our sites the tools to do so as well.

The Facebook 'Like' button is super easy to implement and i highly recommend you guys do so on your own websites. But make sure you track the incoming return traffic from Facebook, i.e. once the link to your content has been shared to a user's Facebook wall and their friends click on it and return to your site, make sure you are able to track that as it will be strong evidence on the massive positive impact sharing links on Facebook can be for a website trying to attract more visitors.

We track this 'social network return trafic' by appending a query string value to each link we share out:

For e.g:
http://wwos.ninemsn.com.au/worldcupslideshow/92676/opening-concert-in-soweto.slideshow

Is shared out as:
http://wwos.ninemsn.com.au/worldcupslideshow/92676/opening-concert-in-soweto.slideshow?sn=true

And then when the link is clicked in Facebook and returns to our original location, we use this querystring value and store that along with the 'Referrer', in this example the referrer is 'facebook.com'. We can then pull reports using our analytics tool on how much 'New' referrer traffic has come in from facebook.com because of the 'Like' button, and this is a very useful statistics to have. You can also do the same for when you share links out to Twitter, and in that case store the return impression of the link along with the referrer (twitter.com), which is then give you the 'New' referrer traffic you got from twitter.com.

So get started and share out your content on Facebook using the Like button, its so easy and the benefits are massive. To learn how you can integrate the Facebook 'Like' button on your site go here: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like

Good luck.

A controlled test of the Facebook ‘like’ button on the #ninemsn sports site boosted our Facebook referrer traffic by 1500%! This is amazing!less than a minute ago via TweetDeckMark Paul
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