Can the New Google Friend Connect Help Your Blog?
Google Friend Connect has emerged with a handful of new features today, making it easier for site publishers to gather data on their visitors and relate back to site visitors once they’ve left the site. Additionally, the updated Google Friend Connect will provide more ways in which site visitors can connect with each other, as long as they’re registered and participating Google users.
As a blogger, the added ability to connect with your site visitors as well as their added ability to connect with each other means that the social capacity of your blog is increased. What Google is looking to do with Friend Connect is foster relationships between site visitors to flourish outside of your site. This is initiated by Google sharing volunteered information between you and your site visitors, providing a recommendation tool for them to find like-minded individuals that are also on your site. From here, Google provides the means by which they can communicate.
Letting Google become the switchboard for communication amongst visitors of your blog gives you an indirect marketing tool for your online publication. The benefit of this is that discussions about topics you may have covered on your blog can be carried further throughout the social web.
As Google Friend Connect already has a few sharing tools to help encourage this type of user behavior, the additional capacity to connect your blog with your users, and your users with each other could become great way for you to build your brand.
The direct tools for doing this are not yet part of Google’s initiative with Friend Connect, but you can see where the potential for this kind of brand-building can go. Beginning to build out your Google Friend Connect strategy at this point could prove helpful in the long run.
One reason for such potential benefit is the ability for Google to reach much of the average user’s daily web activity. With a growing number of Google applications, Google is penetrating as many aspects of the market as possible. These can typically be linked together from an individual standpoint, presenting consumers with a simplified and central hub for nearly everything they do online.
Already Google is doing testing on some of the newsletter options surrounding brands and their level of interactivity for a customer’s inbox. Providing more and more direct ways for brands to communicate with consumers is a high level objective for Google, and it is one that bloggers can also take advantage of.
The ability to generated targeted and custom newsletters based on the information Google provides on its users through Friend Connect is merely one of the updates we’re seeing this week. In this regard, your participation in Friend Connect could give you insight as to what kind of direct marketing works best for you.
Of course, this data can be related back to Google AdSense, which may correlate to a portion of the revenue you generate on your site. The packaged data given to you by Google through Friend Connect can further help you in site metrics and other valuable data to help with your own marketing efforts.
Another reason for such potential behind Google Friend Connect on blogs is the fact that the concept has already been proven by Facebook. Several blogs enable Facebook Connect on their sites, giving you a direct link to other Facebook users hat also visit your site. For site visitors, they can see other Facebook users that share similar interests, and can then connect on Facebook, moving beyond your site.
Any Google Friend Connect implementation on your blog would be somewhat experimental at this point. Google still has a ways to go in establishing its social side, and that goes for partners, publishers and end users. Nevertheless it’s important to keep current trends in mind, especially if they may possibly help you grow your brand’s online presence.
Source:bloggingtips.com
