Understanding the Facebook Like Button

Jon Cogan

 I have received a lot of questions from people asking me what this new Facebook "Like" button is all about. In the simplest of terms, "Like" has replaced the word "Fan." But there is more too it than just that.

Content on any site can now be fitted with this "Like" button. Upon clicking "Like" a message appears in the end users Facebook newsfeed that the user liked the content. A counter appears with the "Like" button showing how many people "Like" that piece of content, or website in general.

The Like button enables users to make connections to your pages and share content back to their friends on Facebook with one click. Since the content is hosted by Facebook, the button can display personalized content whether or not the user has logged into your site. For logged-in Facebook users, the button is personalized to highlight friends who have also liked the page.

This is great news for businesses as it now has become as easy as a single click to have a company's web content shared across the viral Facebook network. Even better, a page gets created on Facebook for every "Like" button implemented. This offers content providers the ability to view the information of anyone who has chosen to "Like" a piece of content. From there, the sky is the limit as to what the content provider can do next. Companies that are offering up the content in the form of say, a product page on their website, can directly market that particular product to any of those "fans" (now called "likers" I guess).

The fact that most user privacy settings are set to share rather openlywith their friends, even a Liker's friends become open to the publisher. This last part has raised the biggest privacy concerns.

Let's say you decide that you don't want to share your information with the sites you interact with on the web, but you do have a very open policy with your friends. You better make sure this open policy does not extend to sharing settings for applications and sites you interact with. If you visit privacy settings in your account profile, you can change this to be more closed off. Understand that if you close off sharing with sites entirely, you will be missing out on a lot of what the Facebook powered web will have to offer, which is a more personalized web experience.

Pandora is a great example. After the like feature was added, people were waking up to their favorite songs and bands being played. Why? Because Pandora found it in each user's profile. A bit creepy? Yes. Pretty col too though, huh?

Comments

[SEO India]

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