We have seen couple of Nigerian startups struggling to take off over the years and I look through them and trying to see what one thing could help them leap frog. I come to the conclusion that plugging Facebook to their application could just be that one thing that will help them move past the traffic acquisition stage and focus on better product development and monetization.

I still wait to see if any of the top Nigerian social networking sites will think about that.

Why Facebook?

Facebook currently have over 500million active users on its platform with hundreds of thousand websites already using the Facebook Connect to trigger user sign up for their sites. While in Nigeria, Facebook users are more than 1.6 million (this is a goldmine I must say).

The headache most internet users (like me) face, have so much to do with having to sign up on every website we go just because we want to use their service. Managing these accounts become another job on its own and I don’t think you are ready to add another job to your fulltime job!

The social graph

One of the selling points of Facebook is its rich social graph; social graph is simply your online activities within your social circle. You can call Facebook a “Big brother” on your social activities; ranging from your friends, friends of friends, location, town, state, country, interest and various other information that define you.

I will not be willing to fill a long form on Facebook and go ahead to 10 other sites to fill same information, people simply stay glued to their Facebook account with massive information and enter just “basic” information on other sites.

The product

On social media, the product really are the users and their social graphs, if you are unable to extract enough information from your user I doubt the extent to which you will be able to monetize your information.

Social media as come to stay, for now, there is no viable competitor to Facebook on a large scale and even on a local scale. Trying to compete with Facebook with basic social media feature will only be nothing other than mere exercise (or fantasy) instead of focusing on profitable web solutions.

Some Nigerian sites that have used Facebook connect with positive impact; Jobberman.com and Fansconnectonline.com

So, if you think Facebook Connect is for you, why not check it out, integrate it to your site, leverage on it and move on from their.