Facebook rolled out a new feature recently called Embedded Posts, giving businesses, news outlets and organizations a social plug-in to take any public post and republish it on their websites, or anywhere else on the Web.
Ideally, the embedded posts are marketed as an easy way for a company to make itself look good, scooping up a glowing Facebook post and embedding it anywhere it wants—an organic social advertisement. Yet the easy two-step process (click “Embed Post” and then simply paste the provided line of code into your Web page’s HTML) opens up a host of possibilities for augmenting websites or blogs and cross-promoting content.
In terms of developers, embedded posts can highlight software testimonials, take a gushing Facebook post touting the design, functionality and other qualities of an app, and slap it right on the software’s product page or developer website. Any comment from a user, socialized news article, product review or opinion of another developer, is immediately marketable.
Now that embedded posts are widely available, Facebook is serving up a much more marketable offering to businesses than static company pages. Any text, images or video on Facebook can be quickly re-appropriated to spruce up a website or blog, instead of waiting for a Web designer to get around to it.
Embedded posts give businesses and marketers yet another instantaneous way to advertise, reaching out to target demographics that already live their entire lives on social networks.
And it’s another blow in the contentious battle for social networking supremacy among Facebook, Twitter, Google and others. It’s worth noting that Google and Twitter recently followed suit, adding embedded posts on Google+ and embedded tweets on Twitter. The back-and-forth competition—like Twitter and Facebook’s dueling multimedia platforms, Vine and Instagram—is part of the struggle to establish which network can make itself most indispensable.
Embedded posts are still too new to gauge their full potential for online growth and marketability, but the feature is another way for social networks to sink their hooks deep into the business community. Not to mention there are countless uses that no one’s even thought of yet.
