Awaken your online community

Building an online community is a great way to generate support for your cause, and there are lots of social networks that can help you do just that. With all of the buzz, though, it can be easy to forget about your organization's own website and the social features you can add directly to it.

Google Friend Connect offers quick and easy ways to strengthen the community that visits your site by enriching it with social features. With Friend Connect, anyone visiting your site can join and discover other members on your site by using accounts from a variety of services, including Google, Yahoo, AOL, and Twitter. You can also choose from a gallery of what we call "gadgets" to add features such as commenting, ratings and reviews, and opinion polls to your site. There's even a gadget for making your event marketing more engaging and social.

Watch this video to learn more about Friend Connect:



It only takes a few minutes to add Friend Connect to your site and you don't need any programming skills whatsoever. Upload two files to your site, then copy and paste a few snippets of code, and Friend Connect does the rest. It's that simple.

And we're constantly coming up with more features you can add to your site, such as the social bar and the Get Answers gadget. To stay updated on what's going on with Friend Connect and other Google products helping to make the web more social, visit the Social Web Blog.

Posted by Mendel Chuang, Google Friend Connect Team