The following is an excerpt from the Facebook Marketing Bible, the comprehensive guide to marketing your company, app, or brand using Facebook. The full version of this article includes detailed examples of Facebook integrations on three more websites including a group deals provider, a non-profit, and a job search utility. It teaches developers how to increase Facebook logins, on-board new users, and get the most referral traffic from the Like and Recommend buttons.

Facebook’s Developers site hosts the Facebook Platform Showcase, which displays examples of Facebook integrations on third-party websites. Many of these integrations demonstrate best practices that can be applied by developers, web publishers, and brand marketers to their own sites. Here we’ll look at four of the best integrations, detail the most valuable parts of their strategies, and explain how what they are doing can be generalized to other sites.

LIFE.com

Login Footer Bar

General interest entertainment magazine site LIFE.com features a myLIFE footer bar allowing users to connect with their Facebook account. The overlaid bar is persistently visible at the bottom of the site, regardless of where a user scrolls or navigates. This ensures users are always a single click away from a social experience.

A footer bar is good choice for sites that want to increase the likelihood of users logging in with Facebook, such as those who are collecting data to optimize their site design or run targeted ads.

Persistent Like and Share Buttons

The bar includes options to log in through Google, Twitter and Yahoo! as well as Facebook. When logged in with Facebook, the bar displays Like and Share buttons for the current page. The footer bar frees the site from cluttering every separate page with these buttons.

Sites that are already cramped or don’t want to add buttons to each page individually can benefit from such an integration.

Facebook Favorites

The Facebook Favorites button reveals the most shared pages from the site, helping users navigate directly to popular content instead of sifting through everything the site has to offer. Rather than only show Facebook’s Recommendations plugin on the home page, constantly taking up space, LIFE.com collapses the plugin and so users can view it upon request.

Media and news sites with large volumes of content should consider this type of integration of the Recommendations plugin, as it doesn’t require any site redesign, and helps users find the most compelling content that will lead them to return more frequently.

Misstep: No HTML Markup for Photo Likes

LIFE.com also uses a standard integration of the Facebook Comments plugin, and includes another instance of the Like button below photos to further encourage users to form a connection to the site.

One misstep in the integration is that no HTML markup is included to specify a image for Likes of photos. This markup allows a site to select an image to appear in the news feed story generated by the Like. In LIFE.com’s case, a standard logo appears, but a thumbnail of the Liked photo would be much more compelling and drive more referral traffic. Sites should use the HTML markup to ensure the primary image on any Liked page appears in the news feed story.

Continue reading and learn more about how to best integrate Facebook into third-party websites at the Facebook Marketing Bible.