We found something pretty compelling while reviewing analytics with a client the other day.

The client participates in the social web — they’ve got outposts on some of the major strategic networks and actively engage with customers. They monitor and are progressive with their digital strategy.

However, the focus of their digital footprint has been on active participation on these networks. As you know, social web has quickly expanded from constraint on networks to socializing content on any site and/or application. Native integration is important and robust APIs make this possible. [all of this when and where appropriate, of course]

A month ago, our recommendation was to begin to wade into some native integration on their primary site.

We installed ‘Like Buttons‘ on product pages. Note – that means that for someone to interact with them, they have to be ON the site, not on a social network.

After 1 month, results have been positive. While the total number of likes is very small (142 as of writing) the pageviews and visits that those likes produced exceeded 4,000 each in just 1 month.

What I mean is that when someone on the primary site ‘liked’ a product from that page, that ‘event’ was pushed (via Facebook Graph API) to their News Feed. Facebook users (some might have been fans of the client already, though we assume many were not) used that ‘like event’ from their friend as a link to visit the client’s primary website (we’re tracking referral URLs through Google Analytics).

above: pageviews filtered to referring URL generated from ‘like’ button

Leveraging customers’ social graphs through APIs allows what used to be utilitarian informational content on a primary site to become hooks — creating more brand touchpoints, working to acquire new eyeballs (customers) and continuing to allow peer preference to influence behavior. An intentional alignment of multiple web properties optimizes content and allows you to cover necessary ground.

Where are you (or your clients) leveraging APIs like we did? What sorts of content are you socializing and what are the results?