Importing Contact Lists from Social Networking sites
Posted By: Thomas Shaw, 12:00am Wednesday 14 October 2009
How many times have you joined a social networking site and wished that your friends would be there with you? Most of us have established friends/contact lists on sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook or MySpace. So how can we make it easy for the user to invite their network to your website?
We know that the best way to generate genuine traffic is by referrals. Allowing your users to invite/import their friends and contacts from the various number of social networking or email providers is a popular method to virally grow your website subscribers.
Some users may have a small number of friends, where as others may have THOUSANDS!
By adding an import function, users can simply connect with their existing social networks or contact lists to invite/notify them of your website.
You may remember my previous blog posts such as Integrating your Job Board with Facebook Connect, Sharing Jobs on Social Networks using JobGenie or Share on LinkedIn. These are only a small number of API's available for use.
If you are going to add this function, you need to make it as smooth (and transparent) as possible. There are a variety of importing scripts in the marketplace and it is smarter not to reinvent the wheel if someone else has already made it.
