Facebook Connect — integrating your site with Facebook

Alexander Sergeev

wrote this on Мар 11, 2015

Have you heard that Facebook Connect can increase the number of visitors to your site who register? This is absolutely true, because if you put the “Connect to Facebook” button on your site, the user doesn’t need to fill in some of the fields in the registration form. Integrating with Facebook solves a bunch of other important issues.

So you have created your own site and a registration form for users. Your form has fields such as name, date of birth, e-mail, password, and a bunch of others, the standard registration process for the site looks something like this:

1. The user enters their name, e-mail address and a password.
2. A message with a link to confirm the email address is sent to the user's e-mail. Sites have to send out this message to verify the e-mail address. If a user has entered their address wrong, then mail from the site will not reach them. An e-mail address is typically the only way a site can communicate with the user (if the site is not integrated with Facebook).
3. The user clicks the confirmation link, their account becomes active, and registration is complete. The user is then redirected to the homepage.

This process can be a lot more complicated though, the user may have to upload a photograph during registration for example, something which is often required on dating sites.

So what could go wrong with this registration process? For starters, your mail could go to the user’s spam folder, or it may not be delivered at all. If this happens, you have to ask the user to check their spam, ask them to send a confirmation mail again, maybe even shoot videos to show the user how to make sure mail from your site does not go into their spam folder.

And you have to do all this, because if your mail is not delivered to a user’s inbox, you lose your way of communicating with them. They may simply forget about your site and stop visiting it. If you have a user's e-mail address, and mail is delivered to their inbox, you can keep them interested and lure them back to your site. Guaranteeing mail is delivered successfully is one of the most serious problems facing sites today.

So now, let’s take a look at the registration process if your site is integrated with Facebook:

1. The user sees the “Connect to Facebook” button on your page. They click on it because they already know and trust Facebook.
2. The user is likely to be logged in to Facebook already, so they do not need to log in again, they just agree to authorize your site to access their profile.
3. You import all the data you need from their profile and add them to your database and can now consider them a user of your site.
4. If you have multi-step registration, you can ask the user to enter additional data. At this stage you can also request any information required from users to register for your site, which is not covered in the user's profile on Facebook. The user will have to enter this information manually.

This method of registration is much faster, because in its most basic form, the user does not need to enter any information, he or she simply clicks a few buttons and that´s all.

Examples:

• meetville
• pinterest
• imdb
• flickr
• digg

“What about delivering mail to the user?” you may ask. When a user registers via Facebook this issue is automatically resolved. Previously all mail sent from your site to the user, would be sent from Facebook’s server and domain. All mail servers around the world sent the mail directly to the user´s inbox, because it came from Facebook, and not from a site which is less well known [here enter the name of your site].

Unfortunately, this system is no longer in operation, and Facebook no longer delivers the mail. That doesn’t mean you have no way to communicate with your users who have registered via Facebook though, as Facebook introduced the Notifications API. For further information on how the Notifications API works, follow the link.