Nowadays, it’s hard to imagine a Facebook that doesn’t organize and present your networks’ updates in a digestible, magazine-like manner. Not only does the News Feed deliver curated content for Facebook users, but it also allows businesses with Facebook Pages to increase the visibility of their updates.

Earlier this month, Facebook announced some changes to its News Feed, which point to an emphasis on visual content and make personal curation easier than ever before. As the News Feed’s user experience continues to evolve, businesses need to know how to adapt their Facebook presence and content to optimize for brand engagement.

To give businesses a better understanding of the redesigned News Feed, we’ve outlined some significant changes and what they mean for companies:

1. More emphasis on visuals

Over 50 percent of content in an average Facebook user’s News Feed are images, according to Zuckerberg. Recognizing the draw of visual content, Facebook’s new News Feed features larger photos for a richer viewing experience. See below for a comparison of the old News Feed with the new:

The new News Feed (pictured on the right) puts the image front and center–the text merely complements the photo. And as image sizes increase within the News Feed, so do ad dimensions.

With visual content at the forefront of the News Feed redesign, the way new likes on Facebook Pages and check-ins are displayed on News Feeds has also become more visual. Check-ins now display a map indicating the exact location of the check-in, and Page likes feature the cover and profile photos of the Page owner.

What This Means for Businesses:
Visually-appealing content is more important than ever to generate engagement. As images take up more space on users’ homepages, businesses need to share visual content that draws attention. This means that both your Facebook page profile and the website content you’ve made available for users to share across their social networks should include high-quality visuals that meet Facebook’s recommended pixel specifications (600x600px).

2. More choices for users

The new News Feed enables users to filter their streams by the following categories: Most Recent, All Friends, Photos, Music, Following, Games, and Groups. In this way, users can adjust their viewing experience according to their personal preferences and see only the content they care about.

What This Means for Businesses:
Your evangelists are crucial to your brand’s growth. Now that users can sort their News Feeds, your company’s content may not be seen by Facebook users unless your followers toggle to the “Following” category. On the flip side, businesses that succeed in posting content that Facebook users “like” and share with their networks bump up their chances of also being discovered on multiple feeds, including the “All Friends” and “Most Recent” feeds.

3. More focus on content

As the News Feed develops a crisper “magazine-like” feel, the links that appear will include longer preview text to give users a better grasp of the content it’s linking to. Businesses that manage to share interesting, quality content that gets shared across different social graphs will see an increase in content and brand visibility. For instance, Facebook will aggregate publishers’ most-shared posts into a grid and publish it on News Feeds along with that publisher’s logo, as pictured below.

What This Means for Businesses:
Content is key to brand discovery and engagement. Longer text blurbs for linked content on News Feeds makes useful, quality content a necessity for businesses looking to increase website traffic and engagement. On the other hand, longer text previews also make it easier for users to detect and avoid clicking on link-and-bait sources with flashy titles but poor content.

As Facebook continues to adapt its design and technology to deliver the information and personalization that their users want, businesses need to continuously reevaluate their marketing strategies to engage with users in impactful, relevant ways. Read more to learn about how another new Facebook feature, Graph Search, affects your business’s marketing strategy.

-Emma Tzeng, Marketing @gigya

Facebook’s new Graph Search aims to do exactly that–make online search personal.

The implications of Graph Search for users are clear: Facebook members will soon gain access to a searchable database of their friends’ interests and whereabouts. However, the initial impact of Graph Search on businesses is often not so obvious.

Below are a few ideas about what Graph Search means for businesses:

1. SEO is no longer limited to keywords

With Facebook’s Graph Search, social credibility is the new SEO. In other words, the number of Facebook likes, shares, and posts will determine search engine rank. Because Graph Search results are based on “real world referral traffic,” or recommendations from users’ social networks, it’s more important than ever for businesses to cultivate their Facebook presence.

One way that companies can facilitate social sharing is to offer social plugins that make it easy for online audiences to interact with other users and share certain behaviors with their social networks. For instance, an e-commerce site could offer exclusive promotions to customers that publish and share product reviews with their social networks such as Facebook. By making the interactions on their websites more social, brands can encourage desired social behaviors on Facebook and boost their Graph Search results.

2. The “Like” could become the new link

As “likes” replace links as a major SEO driver, businesses can no longer ignore the importance of integrating social infrastructure into their web channels. Social is the new currency, and brands that want to keep up need to encourage user engagement with their Facebook presence.

Because Graph Search results will initially show content that members of users’ social networks have interacted with, businesses with higher social engagement will enjoy increased search visibility. Thus, brands should make it easy for users to share content with their Facebook networks by implementing social plugins such as share buttons on their websites to push content to Facebook.

3. Traditional search is becoming social

Even traditional search engines like Google and Bing have taken steps to integrate social into search in the past year: Google’s Search Plus Your World and Bing’s Social Search both incorporate friends’ online activity into web search results. As social networks evolve from social channels for online interactions into credible sources for finding and discovering new information, online user engagement is now a measurable indicator of SEO.

Facebook’s Graph Search opens up new opportunities for companies that are able to create relevancy around their brands by deeply integrating social into their web experience. It is, however, up to the companies themselves to adapt to the changing landscape by giving users what they want–a more connected, social web experience.

-Emma Tzeng, Marketing @gigya

As more and more users sign in and input personal data into social networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Google, these sites accumulate mountains of actionable insight into their users’ backgrounds, interests, and purchasing habits. Businesses that tap into this user data can better understand their customers and gain a huge leg up over their competitors.

Sounds like a marketer’s dream, right? There’s a catch: Social data comes hand-in-hand with big responsibility. More specifically, businesses with access to social data must exercise transparency over data usage and make it a priority to uphold users’ privacy rights.

Users are both concerned about their privacy and generally uncomfortable with the idea of handing over personal data to corporations. In the wake of these concerns, it’s increasingly important for businesses to communicate clearly with their online audiences about how their personal information is being stored and leveraged.

Big Data can be Tricky

As social data continues to increase in volume, businesses can analyze and utilize user information to create relevance, context, and personalization around their marketing efforts. At the same time, though, consumers are often left in the dark about what corporations can and will do with their personal data. A study of over 2,600 U.S. consumers revealed that 40 percent of consumers choose not to sign in using their social identities because they are unsure of how their personal information will be used. When users opt out of social login, businesses miss out on valuable opportunities to glean from a rich, existing well of behavioral and demographic data about their customers.

It All Starts with Trust

How can businesses optimize their marketing strategies by reducing user apprehension towards data sharing? The key is transparency and integrity, according to Gigya CEO Patrick Salyer (@patricksalyer). Rather than approaching personal data sharing as a take-all relationship, corporations need to respect user information by protecting it and using it appropriately. Businesses also need to offer value for users who share personal data.

“Promise your users that you’ll do the right thing by offering a ‘virtual handshake,’ where users grant you access to their data in exchange for value (often personalization or ease-of-use) and transparency,” Salyer advises. “Building and maintaining trust with customers is critical for any business, big or small, on or offline. It’s not just ethical to be transparent about how you use your customers’ data – it’s good business.”

Building customer trust takes time and effective communication. Read on to learn about best practices.

-Emma Tzeng, Marketing @gigya

The Facebook ‘Like’ button began as one of the first connection points for brand sites and Facebook users. When it was unveiled at F8 back in 2008, marketers licked their chops over the prospect of being able to bring in fans to their companies’ Facebook pages and begin serving them with relevant content right on the Newsfeed. While the Facebook ‘Like’ button helped break down barriers between sites and an increasingly social base of web users, it hasn’t turned out to be quite the panacea that brands and publishers have been looking for when it comes to socializing content.

In fact, recent research from Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, an Australian marketing think-tank, revealed that the Facebook Like button seems to be failing to make much of an impression on users as they peruse their Newsfeeds. Ehrenberg-Bass’s study found that only about one percent of users actually engage with brand pages they’re subscribed to. While this data shows the failings of the Like button, the research also gives us a chance to rethink how brands can leverage Facebook (and other social networks) to reach a larger audience.

We frankly don’t need a study to understand that connecting your site to social networks entails a lot more than slapping on a ‘Like’ button. Rather, in order to drive referral traffic and increase engagement with content, sites should look to technologies that actually encourage on-site conversations that can be shared to social feeds. After all, why would you want to send all of your hard-earned traffic to Facebook when you can keep users on your site as they bring their friends over to interact with content and each other?

Technologies like Social Login, Comments, Share Plugin and Gamification can help you spread your content across the social web while keeping users engaged on your site. Just as importantly, by adding these components to your site, you can gain access to an incredible amount of permission-based social data – and that’s valuable stuff that you can use to inform your email marketing campaigns, content/product recommendations and ad-segmentations.

Without a doubt, the Like button opened doors to reaching social users. Now, with the advent of innovative on-site technologies, brands have the opportunity to create real, immersive social experiences and gain actionable insights on their users.

Increased engagement, traffic, pageviews and data – what’s not to like about that?

– Victor White, Marketing
@VictorWhite

Here’s a summary of the announcements made at F8 and how they will affect your site:

Enhanced Sharing
Facebook now encourages sites and apps to share most or all user activities into Facebook. For example, if a user listens to music, Facebook encourages the music app to share each and every song the user listens to. If the user reads news on a website, then every article the user reads could be shared too.

Easy Access to the Massively Shared Data
Facebook has addressed issues with News Feed overflow, and therefore, to mitigate the problem of placing every update from every user in the News Feed, they created a new area on the News Feed page (called “The Ticker”) which reflects every new shared activity from users. This is designed to enhance the user experience by presenting important shares in the main News Feed area while presenting real time activities on the right-hand side of the Facebook page. The News Feed items enable users to participate in the actions their friends posted about with a single click.

Additionally, any type of share, whether a standard share or an activity share is presented in the user’s Timeline, the new Facebook profile page which encompasses the user’s entire Facebook history. Facebook took it a step further, enabling the data to be represented in various ways on the Timeline using apps. Developers can now create an embeddable window in the user’s Timeline and customize the way it represents the data captured about the user. For example, a news website can create a post in the Timeline that shows the articles the user read. These posts are like small widgets designed to increase referral traffic to the site that created the widget.

How Will Gigya Clients Benefit?
The Facebook platform has always been about two-way traffic – providing information to sites/apps from Facebook, and sharing information into Facebook. The same principle abides with the new Graph APIs as sites will now be able to broadcast any action their users take to Facebook. This kind of reciprocal relationship between sites and Facebook brings major benefits to your sites like increasing shares to Facebook as well as clicks back to the site. All reported activities will now be part of the new Open Graph which is also accessible to sites, creating a richer set of data that sites can leverage to gain a better understanding of their user-base. Gigya is now integrating Facebook’s new APIs into our plugins as well as into our Super API. Gigya plugins, including Share, Activity Feed, Reactions and Gamification, will take full advantage of these new APIs and Open Graph.

Gigya will also work with clients to strategize and configure unique Timeline posts to work in conjunction with the new Open Graph sharing.

At this point, most of the new Facebook features are not accessible to public users. Gigya is currently integrating the new Facebook APIs, and will release the new features as Facebook rolls out the upgraded experience to its entire user base.

- Patrick Salyer, CEO

The “Like” button also provides an opportunity to build relationships. While the site does not have information on any individual user, the entity that was “Liked” can publish relevant activity to the Likers as a group. For example, a children’s apparel retailer could promote an end of season sale to “Likers” of its winter coats. A publisher could publish pieces by op-ed writers to people who Like a particular op-ed piece.

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Best Practice #5: Optimize shared content for the feed and user profile

While some content may be intrinsically more interesting than others, one thing is certain: presentation counts when it comes to driving referral traffic. Optimizing all the elements of what is published to a user’s feed is important for both “Likes” and shares.

There are two different “Like” button implementations, and while the iFrame version is easier to implement, the XFBML version gives you more opportunity to optimize. “The XFBML dynamically re-sizes its height according to whether there are profile pictures to display, gives you the ability (through the Javascript library) to listen for Like events so that you know in real time when a user clicks the “Like” button, and it always gives the user the ability to add an optional comment to the “Like.” If users do add a comment, the story published back to Facebook is given more prominence4.”

Prominence on Facebook means it’s more likely that the Facebook algorithm will actually display a “Like” to people in the user’s network, or to more people in their network, so taking the time to use the XFBML version and enable commenting is highly worthwhile. Optimizing “Likes” for the feed also involves adding Open Graph tags with information that Facebook can pull when someone clicks the “Like” button. To optimize for the feed, in addition to information that categorizes each item within the Open Graph, sites should also be sure to specify the image and text that will show in the feed item:

Shared items should similarly be optimized for maximum exposure. One of the advantages of the latest generation of sharing technologies is that you have full control over the image and hyperlinks that appear at the bottom of the feed item. In this example, the item published includes a photo that supports the content and a link at the bottom that specifically drives more people to the original site to take the poll:

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Best Practice #6: Track referral traffic from sharing activity

Capturing referral traffic data is a key part of optimizing your site for social referral traffic, not unlike how social analytics are applied for search engine optimization. If you are working with a social technology vendor, they should at a minimum provide consolidated cross-network analytics, and ideally more granular and actionable detail. Online businesses should track and act on three key areas:

Area 1: The % of shares and referral traffic coming from each of the social networks. Including a shortened URL with each shared item enables tracking at this level. Key metrics include:

• Monthly and yearly growth in traffic referred by social networks.
• Referral traffic by users sharing content from the website, as differentiated from marketing efforts originating on social sites.
• Number of referral clicks per shared item and by referring social site

Area 2: The specific site content and activities that drive the highest volume of sharing activity. Ask vendors if they are able to track sharing and referral traffic by content ID so that you can determine where to focus your efforts on both dynamic sharing activities and content development.

Area 3: Key Influencers. When sharing is tied to authentication, you should be able to track which of your customers or visitors are sharing the most, which are driving the most referral traffic, and even which are driving sales. Businesses can then engage these key influencers with special offers, elite status, and by providing even more opportunities to spread the word.

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Gigya: Make Your Site Social

We welcome the opportunity to speak with you about why our deep experience, results-based approach, and unparalleled technology have made Gigya the leading platform for making sites social.

To learn how Gigya can help your site implement help scale word-of-mouth and drive traffic from social networks and other social channels, please visit our website: www.gigya.com or call us at 650.353.7230.

Rapidly or reluctantly, retailers are adding social channels and tools to their arsenal, urged on by customers and competitors who are already using them.

Facebook in particular has become increasingly important to retailers in the past year. Half of the top 25 retailers have integrated Facebook into their own sites, as have 17 of 25 fastest-growing retailers, a telling statistic. In 2010 Facebook created a new team to work with retailers and help them best leverage Facebook Platform products such as the “Like” button and login to drive business.

There are a plethora of powerful social tools, but three best practices will help you effectively tap that power while creating a customer experience that appropriately reflects your brand.

1. Invest equally in integrating Facebook into your own site as in Facebook.com
2. Incorporate ecommerce and social best practices both on your site and on Facebook.com
3. Close the loop to enable seamless shopping

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#1 Invest equally in integrating Facebook into your own site as in Facebook.com

Why is it important to invest equally in your on-Facebook and off-Facebook social strategies? According to Facebook, a combination of on-site and off-site Facebook tools and technologies can create a “social recommendations engine that personalizes sites and powers word of mouth at scale.” Most retailers are comfortable with running a variety of promotions on their Facebook Pages, but less comfortable with using Facebook tools on their own sites. The discrepancy is illustrated below, with 91% of retailers surveyed using or planning to use a Facebook Page, but significantly fewer looking at integrating Facebook for Websites (formerly “Facebook Connect”) for their own sites.

An important area of focus for 2011 is making the rest of the web as social as Facebook. In a December interview, Ethan Beard, Director of Facebook Developer Network, told Internet Retailer, “We’re not trying to recreate the Internet on Facebook.com. In fact, I spend most of time working with people to socialize the web outside of our site.” Altimeter analyst Jeremiah Owyang calls 2011 “the year of integrating social with the corporate site.”

Investing equally in social for your own site is the path to creating a consistent brand experience for your customers wherever they are, and in getting the most out of your entire social investment.

At the most basic level, integrating Facebook into your own retail site means you don’t have to “send your customers away” to be social. You can add social context and create a loop between Facebook and your site without distracting consumers from the shopping process. Most retailers have a significant investment in search marketing programs, and keeping people on the site is a cardinal rule.

Consider the following examples. In the first, visitors to Macys.com who want to “Like” the Macy’s brand must click the “Facebook” icon, which redirects the browser window to the Macys brand Page on Facebook.com. Shoppers then have to click “Like” on the Macy’s Facebook Page, then hit the “back” button on the browser or re-navigate to the Macys.com site to return to their original path. This process leaves a lot of opportunity to be distracted from the original destination and intention. In the second example, Gap.com has implemented the Facebook Like Box plugin. A visitor to Gap.com simply clicks the “Like” button and the process is completed without any additional clicks, creating a connection to the Gap Facebook Page seamlessly and most importantly keeping the person on the site. This is a win-win for Gap and its customers, enabling both to establish a new relationship and a new communication channel on Facebook, without distracting from the shopping process.

While this is a very simple integration example, it is representative of why it is important to get the balance of on-site and off-site social right. According to Facebook, people who click the “Like” button on external sites have 2.4x the number of friends than the average Facebook user, and click on 5.3x more external links, so ensuring you connect with these word-of-mouth advocates is not just a nice-to-have, it’s a must-have.

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#2 Design for the best of ecommerce and social both on your site and off

Tried and true ecommerce best practices still apply when designing a commerce experience on Facebook.com, just as social best practices still apply when integrating social features into your website. JCPenney has a history of running innovative social campaigns on Facebook, and has proven they are not afraid to iterate quickly and learn how best to engage customers and potential customers wherever they are. The company recently launched their full catalog as a store on Facebook, which is embedded as an app within the company’s Facebook page.

While JCPenney deserves kudos for many features, there remains a significant gap between the shopping experience on Facebook and that on JCPenney.com. Important (and best practice) information needed for purchase conversion, like size charts, fabric content, and care instructions, is missing, e.g. what age child does that size M boys’ swimsuit correspond to? Out of stock notifications don’t come until after placing an item into your bag. One of the app’s strengths is the ability for existing JCPenney.com customers to checkout using their existing JCPenney.com accounts, an important best practice. The core shopping user experience and associated best practices are retailers’ strengths to leverage in a social context.

The JCPenney shopping app includes solid social sharing functionality, such as the “Like” button and Comments plugin, which displays the shopper’s profile picture and enables that person to share comments about products to her profile and friends.

Social features that JCPenney could add to further enrich both their shopping app on Facebook.com and their own website include:

Applying social data to streamline the checkout process

Tapping into a shopper’s profile data to streamline the checkout process can increase conversion and improve the user experience. When JCPenney launched the shopping app, it asked for permissions upfront, but the company pulled the permission step off when people balked at some of the requests. Facebook best practices are to only ask for permissions at the time they are needed, to ask only for the data needed, and to provide a clear explanation.2 For example, JCPenney could ask for access to a shopper’s profile data at the time a new account is created, and include an explanation of how that data will be used. Facebook has also recently released a Registration plugin to help sites capture data during the sign-up process, with shopper permission.

Personalization and social context

Social technologies enable personalization and social context for products, ratings and reviews. For example, what products have my friends reviewed or rated? JCPenney could also provide product recommendations based on a person’s Likes and the Likes of his or her friends.

Social shopping features

Enabling people to shop together with friends, create wish lists, or ask friends about specific products could truly tap into the power of the social graph people maintain on Facebook. This would provide an additional opportunity for JCPenney to ask for permissions that shoppers would readily give in exchange for a valuable user experience.

Game mechanics

Adding elements of game mechanics, which are essentially social rewards programs, to existing frequent shopper programs can increase margins. Alternating virtual and monetary rewards, like expedited shipping and fun virtual goods, for taking actions like sharing products with friends is just one possibility.

Social and ecommerce expertise is rapidly converging. In early 2011, major ecommerce platform vendors will make modules available that are built in conjunction with social technology and usability experts to deliver social features seamlessly to retail websites and wherever customers are on the web.

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#3 Close the loop to enable seamless shopping

Retailers have rapidly embraced the “Like” button on their websites to drive word-of-mouth. But, providing seamless social shopping means recognizing people as customers as well as Facebook users wherever they are. To do so effectively, retailers can develop ongoing communications to reach those customers while they are spending time on Facebook as well as incorporate powerful personalization activity into their own sites. For multi-channel retailers, this can also include web to in-store promotions.

Targeted communications on Facebook

When consumers click the “Like” button next to a product, it can open up a communication channel between the site and that consumer on Facebook. If the “Like” button has been integrated through the Open Graph protocol, the site can publish information directly to the Facebook News Feeds of all the individuals who have liked the product, and target that information – new products or sales for example – based on the type of item that was liked. Levi’s, one of the earliest adopters of the “Like” button, found that this new channel was an extremely effective way to not only reach a younger and typically elusive target audience, but to drive them to their retail site.

Site personalization

Perhaps the greatest potential impact comes from closing the loop with Facebook users via Social Login. Facebook consumers in particular are aware that they can use their Facebook credentials to register or login around the web, as on Giantnerd.com, an online retailer of high-end outdoor equipment.

Giantnerd has integrated with Facebook, via the Gigya service, to enable Facebook shoppers to register and login, share content, and participate in the Giantnerd community to earn both social and monetary rewards. The site taps into profile data Facebook users have shared to personalize the shopping experience in a variety of ways.

When retailers enable their customers and visitors to connect with their real identity and friends through Facebook, it opens up a wide range of opportunities. With social plugins, sites can gather anonymous and aggregated data from people who have clicked the “Like” button and garner insights to help in customization, but they do not have access to those people as individuals, i.e. they cannot access individual demographic or other profile or social data. It is only when a shopper chooses to sign-in to the site with their Facebook information that a retailer can access to individual data, and can recognize that person uniquely to provide a more personalized shopping experience. Amazon does this quite effectively with their Facebook integration, displaying product recommendations based on customer likes as well as friends’ likes. The site also displays a list of Facebook friends with upcoming birthdays and makes gift recommendations.

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Multi-channel retailers

Seamless shopping can now cross channels. Facebook has always enabled innovative promotional opportunities on Facebook.com that drive traffic to retail sites. Now they have released a mobile deals product, enabling merchants to offer Facebook users deals as individuals, or together with friends, that are redeemed at brick and mortar stores.

2011 is expected to be a breakout year for social commerce, bringing together the expertise of the retail and social ecosystems to deliver technologies, services and programs that impact the retail bottom line.

About Gigya, Inc

Gigya is a software-as-a-service technology that unifies the most popular identity and social providers including Facebook, Twitter, PayPal and LinkedIn and brings the features and benefits to corporate websites. Gigya enables businesses to deepen customer relationships and tap existing friend networks, driving social registrations, word-of-mouth at scale, and social interaction for websites and applications. In addition, Gigya provides social analytics, best practices, consulting and support to optimize every implementation. Supporting more than 280 million users each month across more than 500,000 sites, Gigya’s technology is the choice of global leaders in publishing and commerce including CBS, Fox Sports, Intuit, The Coca-Cola Company, The Home Depot, and Turner Networks. Gigya is a leading company in the Social CRM market, which Gartner forecasts to reach $600 million this year.

Facebook introduced the Preferred Developer Consultant Program (PDC) in December 2009 to provide brands, companies, and organizations a trusted list of companies experienced in integrating flagship Facebook Connect and other platform implementations that employ best practices and enhance existing experiences.

The Facebook blog post says “What separates a PDC from most other digital development firms is the ability to understand social mechanics and technical possibilities on Platform.”  At Gigya we are focused on helping our clients by bringing these two areas of expertise:

1. The ability to work technically with the Facebook API, ensuring any changes Facebook makes to the APIs are incorporated immediately to deliver the optimal user experience, and

2. The social expertise, providing plug and play features that deliver the most popular and effective social experiences and the best practices for working with them.

As part of the selection process, Facebook looks for potential PDCs that can deliver value-added social experiences, integrate best practices, and provide product guidance for top web businesses. Facebook conducts a rigorous review of each consultant before approving them for the program.

PDCs are also expected to provide critical feedback from the market to improve the Facebook Connect product. This is a reinforcement of our existing relationship with the terrific Facebook platform team, who are very responsive and supportive of our team and product. We thank them for this stamp of approval and are excited to continue to bring the Facebook experience beyond Facebook to the entire web, helping companies to make their own sites social.

Only a small group of companies have been selected for the program, and an even smaller group have expertise with Facebook Connect. Check out the full list of Facebook PDC’s.

1. Activity Feed Plugin

Our Activity Feed Plugin is one of our most popular plugins because it allows logged-in users to see a real-time stream of friend activities on your site. Think of it as having a complete activity stream without having to implement your own back-end solution.

The plugin is dirt simple to get up and running. Just call the socialize.showFeedUI API method from any page on your site and the Activity Feed renders in HTML. It has a single required parameter called “containerID” which is the DIV container where you want the plugin to show up:

<h3>Activity Feed Plugin Demo</h3>
<div id="ActivityFeedContainer"></div>
<script type="text/javascript">
gigya.services.socialize.showFeedUI(conf, {containerID: 'ActivityFeedContainer'});
</script>

A complete working example of the Activity Feed plugin can be found here.

Like all Gigya plugins, there are plenty of ways to customize the plugin to match the functional requirements of your site. Some of the options are:

• defining the privacy level (public, friends or private)
• changing the plugin dimensions and other CSS-related properties
• enabling or disabling providers
• listening for event handlers like onLoad and onSelectionDone

There’s an additional feature to the plugin that’s worth noting. The “Everyone” tab shows general activity on the site in real time. This tab is viewable by both users and non-logged in users alike. So even if a non-logged in user visits your site, they can still get a broad view of the activity happening among site users.

Publishing to the Feed

So how do you publish activities to your activity feed? The easiest way is to set the “scope” parameter of the socialize.showShareUI (“Share plugin”) and socialize.publishUserAction methods to internal or both. This tells Gigya to publish the feed item inside your site scope so it will appear on the Activity Feed Plugin.

You can also listen for callback events from other plugins and send that data to your activity feed. For example, after the onSendDone is fired from our Reactions Plugin you can publish an item to the activity feed using socialize.publishUserAction. In this scenario, set the scope parameter to “internal” since the reaction was already posted a social network.

For more information, check out the Activity Feed Plugin developer’s guide.

2. Use getFriendsInfo

Many times, you’ll have records in your database that you want filtered by some combination of date and social network friends in order to generate an activity feed (game activity, purchased items, etc). Depending on your backend, this often requires creating a comma-limited list of friend IDs in order to run a database query.

A straightforward way of accomplishing this on the server-side is to use our REST API method socialize.getFriendsInfo. With this method, you can retrieve a user’s social network friends and loop over the IDs to create a comma delimited list. In the example below, we’ll use the PHP SDK to build a simple list of Facebook friend UIDs:

// include PHP SDK
require_once "GSSDK.php";
$apiKey = "[INSERT YOUR GIGYA API KEY]";
$secretKey = "[INSERT YOUR GIGYA SECRET KEY]";

// step 1 - define request
$method = "socialize.getFriendsInfo";
$request = new GSRequest($apiKey,$secretKey,$method);

// step 2 - add parameters
$request->setParam("uid", $gigya_UID);
$request->setParam("enabledProviders", "facebook");
$request->setParam("siteUsersOnly", true);

// step 3 - send the request to Gigya
$response = $request->send();

// handle response
if ($response->getErrorCode() != 0){
echo ("Got error: " . $response->getErrorMessage());
exit();
}

// retrieve response data in JSON format
$user_friends = $response->getResponseText();

// convert to PHP array
$friendsinfo = json_decode($user_friends,true);

// loop over friends to create a comma delimited list
$ls_friends = "";
for($i = 0; $i < count($friendsinfo['friends']); $i++) {
$ls_friends .= $friendsinfo['friends'][$i]['identities'][0]['providerUID'] . ",";
}
// remove last comma
$ls_friends = substr($ls_friends,'',-1);

// output the list
print "<pre>LIST: ($ls_friends)</pre>"

The example above is simple by design, but demonstrates that the process of fetching a list of friend IDs and compiling them for a database query is straightforward. A couple other quick notes:

• By setting the “siteUsersOnly” parameter to TRUE, only friends who have also registered with your site are returned. This can significantly reduce the number of friends you need to loop over.
• You may optionally enable only specific providers in the “enabledProviders” property. For example, if you want only the user’s Facebook and Twitter friends, set enabledProviders=”facebook,twitter”.
• Our definition of a ‘friend’ on Twitter is a person who is both a ‘follower’ and ‘following’ the user.

As you can see, it doesn’t take a lot of effort to start adding activity feeds to your site. This is a popular topic so look for additional blogs about activity feeds in the near future.