Embed your Facebook Apps Anywhere

By Nick Cicero at Social Fresh:
Since their introduction, Facebook applications have been a great way for social media marketers to create unique interactive experiences for their communities and convert fans to leads through contact forms, sweepstakes and giveaways.

Shortstack Labs, a company whose platform allows you to build your own custom Facebook applications, has released a new feature making their applications embeddable on a website or blog.

After creating your application (code your own or choose from one of their many templates for contests, promotions, and data collection) and installing to Facebook, paid users can now turn on the ability to host promotions wherever they install the code.

 

Build once, use everywhere

The addition of this feature opens up a number of new possibilities for brands to increase potential impressions of their promotions since they’re accessible from Facebook as well as on the web and mobile devices.
For brands working extensively with bloggers, they could host promotions on Facebook, and provide embeddable codes to those bloggers to incorporate in their posts. Now, a new audience is introduced to a brand through the blog post, and though a like-gate and entering their information, they’ll be connected in their social feed as well.
For non-profits or other organizations, it could provide simple tools to gain critical mass around a cause or for fundraising. Effectively putting a widget into the hands of anyone willing to provide an audience.

 

Mobile app versions too

If that wasn’t enough, they also give you the option to create a mobile version of your app and even generate a QR code to put on print ads. When used right, you’ll quickly realize that this means you can create a unified message across all social channels tied to one specific goal.
Creating these types of promotions allow marketers to build a better idea of a consumer’s path to discovery online and when paired up with a coupon (or other tracking mechanism,) can be help in first steps to proving the monetary success of social promotions.

Tip: The mobile version of your ShortStack app can only be accessed through their Smart URL. To make it easier for people to remember, buy a custom domain name and redirect the link to the Smart URL. This way it will open in Facebook on a desktop, and the mobile version on a mobile device. It’s easier to tweet too.

A simple example of the ShortStack embedded application