Facebook “Like” Instead of “Fans”
For those of you who have websites that suggest visitors “become a fan” of your Facebook page, you need to update your sites. Facebook has changed “Fans” to “Liking” a page. At their annual f8 Developer Conference, Facebook announced platform updates that work to integrate their platform with sites across the web.
Now with more than 400 million people using Facebook and $100 million of them using Facebook from their mobile phones, Facebook wants to continue this growing trend and develop social applications that integrate web sites with their new tools.
Facebook’s New Social Plugins
- Like Plugin- This is the upgraded “Fan” plugin. This plugin is simple and requires no login. It will show visitors to your site, which of their Facebook friends have engaged with your site recently. If a user likes something on your site with this button it automatically appears in their Facebook profile as well.
- Activity Stream Plugin – This displays a filtered view of the Facebook News Feed containing updates from only your site.
- Facebook Login Plugin- It works like the existing Facebook Connect login button, and it adds photos of your Facebook friends who have already joined the site.
- Social Bar Plugin- A toolbar that is added to the bottom of your site. The Social Bar includes a Like button, friends who like the site, as well as Facebook chat.
- Recommendations Plugin – A plugin that shows recommendations of items or content that visitors to your site may be interested in, based on recommendations from Facebook connections.
So, Why Should Your Business Care About Facebook?
While you should always consider your audience when deciding on any marketing channel, if you are trying to attract people between the ages of 18 and 54, then you should look into Facebook. In addition, if you are using a blog, all of the social plugins mentioned previously in this post help business bloggers achieve the important goal of getting more people reading their content.
As an example, let’s say that you click a link in an e-mail or on Twitter. After clicking, you then go read the blog post as you normally would. If a site is using the Like Plugin, then upon arriving at the blog you could see that some of your Facebook friends have recently read other articles on this blog. As a result, it more likely that you will read more content on the blog and possibly share it with your connections on Facebook or other social networks. As a marketer this is a big deal. It creates stickiness while increasing the reach of your content.
This same example could also be used for landing pages. If you are releasing a new whitepaper and using a form to collect leads, think about the improved lead conversion you could see, if prospects could see that friends had already liked the report on Facebook. In this case a social plugin provides “social proof” for the credibility of your whitepaper. While the likes may have happened on your Facebook fan page, with the new social plugins it is displayed on your own site and landing pages.
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