Over the past few days there has been a new roll-out to Facebook. This roll-out is the “LIKE” button. At first glance it seems pretty harmless. Facebookers are used to “liking” comments or updates from friends, even pictures. The newest change to Facebook is the replacement of the “Become a Fan” button on pages with a “LIKE” button.
“Become a Fan” & “Like” ultimately serve the same function. It’s a way for people to follow your page. Unfortunately, it’s confusing as hell. Here are some talking points:
- Just because someone likes something doesn’t mean they want to follow it.
- Someone who wants to follow something, may not LIKE it – There is a page called AIDS that has 9,475 people. People who were previously following AIDS now LIKE AIDS.
- In the past businesses told their customers to “Become a Fan” on Facebook now what are they supposed to say “Like Us On Facebook?” Sounds ridiculous.
- Facebook is going to hurt it’s own revenue. One of the main reasons that Facebook Page owners advertise using the Facebook Ads system is because they have the advantage of each ad saying “Become A Fan” in the ad itself. It saves people from clicking around and can get fans for pages a whole lot quicker. Now every single ad has a “like” button regardless if it’s for a page or not so there is no way to differentiate whether you are joining a page or liking an ad.
- This is change for the sake of change. It doesn’t make things MORE intuitive, it makes them LESS intuitive.
These social networks need to start hiring some staff with brains. I call for the firing of whoever is involved with this whole “Like” fiasco at Facebook. I hope you “like” job hunting.
If you don’t LIKE the like button either: Join The Club
Now that you put it that way, it is kinda whacked, but so and so became a fan of aids almost sounds worse…
Didn’t think about it much, fan, like, whatever but in certain cases like makes it sound whacked.
I think it is just part of the big picture play. When they roll out the FB like button for the entire web, they probably want to have consistant language. But in certain cases it won’t quite sound right.
Liking a web page makes sense in that your indicating you like the page. Your not indicating you want to follow that web page.
With a facebook page clicking like is not a very obvious way to follow a page. Liking something and following it are completely different. I think that Facebook needs to check out a dictionary.
Yup, agreed. Like and follow are entirely different and it makes sense that they do need both.
The fan pages should have become a fan or even follow this page. On a broader scale everything else could probably get by with Like…
I do agree with you 🙂
The main idea in their new advertising guidelines is “We don’t want misleading ads” and now they come up with this. I don’t know about you but I find it very misleading. Maybe they considered a lot more people hit the like button than the become a fan button.
Your title made me LOL and I get the point for sure. I think facebook is only thinking about how to further increase interaction for their fan pages and less about the effect that it will have.
Right now there is also a problem with their social plugin for websites. The “like this” button does not disclose what you are actually liking. Clicking a “like” button on a Britney Spears fan site could result in liking “FREE ACAI BERRY TESTERZ NEEDED!!!” Just sayin’
@Ed
Yeah, they let you hardcode the url, it seems like they should just check the referral…
I was reading some people’s blogs and found a lot of people saying that Facebook has some big plans on how to become a more integral part of connecting businesses to consumers. They claimed this ‘Like’ feature is the first step in moving them into the intended direction. We will see.
I agree with this 10000000000%. It pisses me off that they won’t let you change the name of your fan page. Now when people “become a fan” of my blogs fan page it’s not “x became a fan of Tom Lambert”, it’s “x likes Tom Lambert” I feel like that’s off-putting and going to hurt the amount of people that join
YES, noticed that TOO, people click the LIKE BUTTON when they really want to click IMPORTANT BUTTON or somethink like that for events that are ot really happy.
For example recently when i was following the tragedy of the Polish President Plane crash where 96 people died, it was like 10,027 LIKE this, really?
I guess it’s also easier to click the LIKE button than become a fan, since it sounds less obligating. so LIKE gets more clicks and thats what facebook cares about, more clicks is better right? just another KPI …
How is being a fan of AIDS any better?
[…] 2 months ago I wrote an article named 9,475 People LIKE AIDS. The article was a response to Facebook changing the “Become a Fan” button to a […]