Facebook’s newly-launched Fan Box helps marketers bring the action to fans with embeddable widgets (image via Flickr).

The meaning of “social networks” has connotations far beyond that of a destination site where people go to keep in touch with their friends. Fittingly, the world’s largest social network wants to be far more than a site people visit.

The new Facebook Fan Box exemplifies the transition. Built on Facebook Connect, the service where publishers can allow visitors to register for their sites using their existing Facebook logins, the Fan Box lets publishers bring their Facebook Page content to their site. Visitors to those Fan Box-enabled sites who log in via Facebook Connect can then become fans of the publisher’s Facebook Page.

What’s great for the site’s visitors is that they never have to leave the site; they can become a fan of the site’s Facebook Page and then continue their activities. The Fan Box is (for most publishers) fairly quick to set up, with just a few lines of code added to the site to get the widget to work. Here’s what 360i’s fan box looks like:

For publishers – a group that also includes marketers with microsites or blogs – they have the potential to substantially increase their fans on Facebook. With more fans, that means there are more consumers with whom they can stay in contact on a regular basis. The potential reach grows much larger in turn, with some of these fans’ actions on the marketers’ Pages showing up as updates to their friends. Thus, there’s value both in reaching these first and second degree consumers. Most of these Fan Box-triggered fans would likely be consumers who would pass through the site, so publishers with a Fan Box will probably want to make it very visible to their visitors.

It’s not a slam dunk for every publisher. First, the publisher must have a functioning Facebook Page, one with status updates and potentially other content such as photos, videos, events, and applications. Publishers and marketers also need to understand how communicating with Facebook fans fits in with their strategic lens by answering the four questions discussed in 360i’s Social Marketing Playbook:

1) Does it meet your brand’s objectives?

2) Does it leverage your brand’s existing arsenal of assets?

3) Does it abide by the social media rules of the road?

4) Does it provide significant value exchange?

If Facebook meets these criteria and the Fan Page is on its way to meeting your objectives, then the Fan Box is a valuable way to build on your current efforts.