Facebook Connect Shares Behavior Patterns With Advertisers

What’s so special about Facebook Connect is that it allows for a method to capture invaluable behavior analysis. Advertisers have been pondering ways to make money off Facebook and MySpace users every since the popular social networks went mainstream. Now, that is being realized with Facebook Connect.

Facebook Connect isn’t alone in sharing user behavior patterns with advertisers. MySpace has been doing it since early summer with successful results. Social networking open access makes it easier to share videos from Hulu or content from Digg. At the click of a button, Facebook Connect means you never have to leave Facebook in order to share that favorite video or news story. Read: 44 Websites Offer Facebook Beacon for Social Distribution

Some people see the problem of privacy, as Facebook invades the daily web surfing activities of its members and makes them public. Facebook Connect will force the largest social network to answer the critics who claim its’ an invasion of privacy for the world to see what sites you’ve visited recently. Your friends’ activities and their friends’ activities will be visible to the world now.

Facebook Connect is supposed to make it easier to create user profiles when you join a new social network. Instead of entering in the same profile information over and over, simply log on to a social networking site, enter your Facebook Connect login and all of your profile information will automatically populate. It makes creating a profile on a social network simple and quick.

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“Everyone is looking for ways to make their Web sites more social,” said Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer. “They can build their own social capabilities, but what will be more useful for them is building on top of a social system that people are already wedded to.”

Yet, Facebook took a lot of heat from privacy advocates, saying the giant social networking site had control of too much personal information about its members, and now sacred behavioral targeting could be shared with advertisers. The Holy Grail of social networking marketing had been found, and it was being shared by Facebook Connect.

Advertisers don’t have a lot of luck with social networks. Only 57 percent of all social network users clicked on an ad last year, and just 11 percent of those clicks resulted in a purchase. Not knowing the behavior of social network users caused advertisers to bang their heads against the proverbial wall. Facebook Connect just solved that problem.