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Build it and they will come ----- NOT !
It has been said, "genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration". This is especially true today, even as
the internet has leveled the playing field for the small entrepreneur. It has opened a flood gate for all "want to be's".
How you make yourself stand out among the flood of businesses emerging on the
internet is probably even more challenging
than marketing in the brick and mortar days. Building a web presence and then wait for people to
knock on your virtual door is simply not enough.
There is no silver bullet, but one of the factors involves utilizing technologies at the right time. Today, of course, one cannot ignore Facebook. With close to 500 million users and growing, any business who offer any consumer facing product or services must jump on this band wagon. Facebook in turn makes it very easy. Since late 2008, it had availed many social features that allows web businesses to interface with it. One powerful feature is Facebook Connect.
Ubiquitously recognizable as  , facebook connect essentially provides these major benefits:
Enhances ease of sign up: This feature is exemplified with site: http://www.fixmylove.com . Facebook Connect allows anyone with a facebook account to sign in, without an actual userid in fixmylove.com. A formal registration is also not necessary. Instead, fixmylove.com will pull user info from facebook, whose data accuracy is likely much greater than if you have user register separately.
Market your site virally: When an user connects to fixmylove.com using Facebook Connect, that action is shown on the user's Facebook wall. Depending on the user's privacy settings, his ‘friends’, or public may see that "fixmylove.com” was visited. This greatly enhances the visibility of the visited site. Eg: if you see your friend have visited a certain site, likely you would want to check it out too.
“Facebook Connect” work hand in hand with Facebook ads: If you have a facebook ad, which usually are displayed on a Facebook user’s page on the right hand side, the user would click on the ad if he was interested. That ad will eventually lead the user to your site. When this happens, wouldn’t you want him to be able to access to you site right away, rather than requiring him to register separately ? I suspect in many cases, users may just navigate away upon seeing need to register all over again (eg: register, wait for email, click on email, login …etc, pretty tedious). Having “facebook Connect” truly maximizes your facebook ad.
Read more about Facebook Connect at: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/guides/web#login
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