Since Facebook opened up its API to developers, over 4,000 applications have been created for its users. As a result, the social networking site has surged to become one of the most highly trafficked web destinations. A recent BusinessWeek article reported on how companies are leveraging employee interest in social networking platforms to strengthen corporate ommunity engagement online.
If you’re a PR practitioner, you should have a Facebook profile, if for no other reason than to try and understand this phenomenon. Many of my colleagues use it to maintain both business and personal relationships. With that in mind, I’ve developed a list of 29 Facebook applications PR professionals can use to maximize the value of this social networking site. These tools can help you to share and exchange information, promote and publicize events, analyze your spheres of influence and of course, to learn a bit more about the people in your network:
Socialistics is a social insight tool providing an analysis of your friends and networks in a bunch of colorful graphs. The app also creates tag clouds analyzing the relationships between the friends in your network.
MyCard displays your virtual business card on your profile. Keep your data up-to-date in one place and transfer it to other services. You can download your friends' contact information as well as attach your business card to any Facebook message.
My Questions is a friend-polling application: ask your friends questions, answer theirs right on their profile pages,.
Countdown Calendar puts a flash based timer on your profile counting down to events. You can also search popular countdowns in the global calendar and share event countdown with friends.
Polls allows you to create your own multimedia poll, which you place on your profile, invite friends to vote, and monitor the results. This applications allows you to use images, videos, or sounds in the poll.
Extended Info helps you to customize the titles of fields that are put on your profile, as well as the content. Friend tagging, view the most popular field titles and categories used, include MP3s and images, YouTube and Google Video clips, news feed integration and support for all character sets (Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Hebrew, Spanish, etc.)
Interactive Friends Graph shows all your friends and their interconnections. You can even send messages, poke, and add-to-friends from within the graph.
My Links acts as a social identity aggregator, providing a space to link to your pages on other sites, including MySpace, LinkedIn, YouTube, Digg, Twitter, Friendster, Wikipedia, and others
Call Me on Skype is an application that gives you the ability to make Skype calls from within Facebook, and even start group chats on your network.
My Profiles is similar to MyLinks, but with a different layout. If you have an account on Friendster or MySpace, or any other site, this application will allow you to list them with links within your Facebook profile.
Connection Cloud is an experiment in grouping and social webs, helping you to visualize your social network and find out who knows who. After simulating a number of steps, the application outputs a .PNG file for your personal use or to post on Facebook.
Friendly Search takes the hassle out of scrolling through lists of friends. Powered by Deloitte Innovation's Vizzl™ Technology. Friendly Search provides a new way to find, sort and filter your Facebook friends. It's simple, fun and has a cool interface.
Super RSS is an RSS reader for Facebook “on steroids.” Features include: multiple RSS feeds aggregation, story sharing, commenting on stories and even the ability to view your friend's stories.
NewsFeed Blast lets you blast a message out to all of your friends' News Feeds at the same time with up to 4 images. This seems like the best way to get a message out to all of your friends at once, and they'll see it right on their main News Feed page when they log in to Facebook.
zuPort: Flickr automatically imports your public Flickr photostream. It’s automatic so you no longer need to post photos to Flickr and Facebook. Customized options let you pick how many photos to show in your profile, how your photos are displayed and which photos are shown. It also displays your newly added Flickr photos in your mini-feed.
Vodpod is a search engine that trolls for your favorite videos from Comedy Central, Myspace, Daily Motion, Google and YouTube, and easily adds them to your profile. You can also add videos from over 800 other sites with an optional browser button.
Mediafire is the easiest way to share files with your Facebook friends. You can create an unlimited number of folders and sub-folders to store, organize, and share your files and images. Use privacy options to keep some files hidden as private and other files as public.
Twitter is a client that lets you see what you and your friends are up to on Twitter and update your Twitter status without leaving Facebook.
News Headline lets you browse hundreds of news feeds from the world’s top news providers, including BBC, CNN, ABC, Fox, Sky, Reuters, CNET, Yahoo and more. Watch feeds and add them to your profile, bookmark individual stories that matter to you and show them in your profile, share news with friends and see what the most popular news feeds are for users on Facebook.
DivShare is similar to Mediafire. It gives you the option to send documents, photos, music and videos to your friends. You can send your files to individual friends, post them to your profile or add them to your news feed.
Top News delivers the latest news from various sources, right into your profile.
Upcoming shows all the events you're attending on your Facebook profile. You can also link your Facebook account to the Upcoming website. Then you'll also see all your Upcoming events on your Facebook profile, and your friends will get News items about everything you're going to.
Friend Stats answers questions like, “Which one of your friends has the most wall posts?” “What concentration do most of your friends have?” “Who has the longest first name?” Adds a page full of graphs, lists, and more graphs about your friends, including: Most popular movies, music, TV shows, etc, Who has the most wall posts/ notes, Political Affiliations, Gender and more.
fonebook can update your number for all of your friends with one click, securely access your fonebook numbers from your mobile phone, call/save numbers to your phone with the mobile site, and switch phones whenever you feel like it.
Super Wall is one of the most widely used Facebook apps. It’s like your old wall, but with videos, pictures, and so much more.
My Wikipedia allows you to display sections of Wikipedia on your profile page. It can be customized to display any article of your choosing.
Splashcast helps create a personal media channel mixing videos, music, photos, and podcasts.
SMS gives you the capability to exchange free SMS messages with your friends on Facebook. The great part is that your phone number is not revealed to anyone and you can view your conversations.
CircleUp lets you “socialize and organize.” Send one message to as many friends or groups as you want and get a single, organized, visual result in return that you can share on your profile.
If there are other Facebook applications that you find particularly useful for public relations professionals, please share them in the comments.
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