Internal documents propose that users can become a fan by just clicking “like”, as opposed to “become a fan”. Their documents, read them here, note that saying “like” is a light-weight method of expressing interest. BlitzMetrics’s take is that this will cause several things to happen:
- Users (I was about to call them “fans”) will be confused as to whether they are liking something or actually joining a Fan page. If Facebook is going to change the language to like, then they should also call a Fan Page a “Like” Page, which would devolve Fan pages into the old Facebook Groups– for when people want to hit thumbs up on a clever slogan. In effect, a fan page becomes more like a bumper sticker popularity contest than a real business presence or one of deeper engagement.
- In a “twitter-esque” move, Facebook is trading volume of interaction with depth of interaction. This is the “light-weight” engagement they mention. We believe that this will increase traffic over the long run and reflect the aim of a social network to be casual conversation. Increased interaction is great from a search engine and investor valuation standpoint– it allows Facebook to show greater numbers, since the bar is lower to become a fan. This is somewhat similar to Twitter announcing they have just crossed 10 billion tweets– who cares how many of these are real (by humans versus robots) or how many were even seen by a human. The point is to show large numbers. Remember the search engine wars on how many pages each had indexed?
- Facebook will be able to sell engagement more broadly: Albeit, the engagement is in the form of someone clicking on a button, as opposed to interacting at a deeper level. Advertisers may not realize this change, which will allow an interim bump in earnings. From an optics standpoint– wouldn’t you want to increase your fan count, even if you have to change your language to say that “X number of people liked my page” instead of “X number of people are fans of my page”?
Hat tip to Nick O’Neill and curious to see what other Facebook advertisers think of this. If a fan might have been worth 50 cents to you before, what’s it worth now?
Interesting post. I like (oops did I just say I like this or become your fan?) this concept as a marketer and someone who uses facebook for business in addition to personal purposes. However I do find it to be a huge marketing ploy on the part of facebook to increase clicks, numbers and the volume of people moving to fan pages.
While this is probably an intelligent business move as Big Numbers and Perception is everything online. Yet to me it is just another example of the mighty facebook preying upon their userbase`s lack of knowledge or understandings. The masses on FB know little of privacy issues and the subtle yet effective differences in wording.
In short if you ever wondered how something FREE like FB could be worth Billions. The answer can be found once you understand little changes like moving from FAN to LIKE.
(In related news facebook will be replacing zip code in your profile with please enter your Blood Type)
Ha Ha— Kevin, that is good. I’d have to admit that were I Facebook, I’d probably do the same thing. Wouldn’t you?
I’m not an advertiser, but I value quality interaction over volume. In fact twitter has become nothing more than a constant stream on nonsense that I don’t want to waste my time on. There’s no depth to it because everybody is talking and nobody is listening (thus nobody really cares). Facebook becoming like that is a little discouraging. I’d rather take the time to make real comments to a few people I care about than be rewarded for being a spammer.
Keith– some people prefer money over friendships– so it’s spamming over carefully chosen relationships, diarrhea versus whatever is the proper analogy…
Facebook has successfully and progressively diminished their true value.
Any social network website should look first to the physical world social network interactions and try to mimic those. Attaching words to a relationship between people is hard. Attaching words to a “relationship” between a company and its customer base is even harder.
My kids like their classmates My kids like chocolate. My kids like Rush’s music.
When my kids click “like” on their classmates FB page – are my kids “fans” of their classmates?
When my kids click “like” on the Hershey FB page – are my kids “fans” of any Hersheys’ Chocolate, just the milk chocolate or the Hershey company?
When my kids click “like” on the Rush FB page – are my kids fans of Rush? Like some of Rush’s songs but would never go to a concert?
Facebook was built by a bunch of 20-somethings who didn’t spend any time thinking about the complex nature of relationships.
The battle to pick the one “word” is meaningless and impossible.
Proof points:
1) No measure of relationship strength – casual, sexual, deep love, or acquaintance.
2) No time component – relationships if not maintained diminish
3) No context – workplace only? professional? activity-centric ( i.e. a bicycling club )?
4) Culture – Middle East v. Germany – very different. In one women are forced to cover up, in the other prostitution is legal. So in Saudi Arabia, “liking” an unmarried woman may invite a visit from her brothers. In Germany, someone may be “liking” their favorite hooker! (Similar cultural differences exist within the U.S.)
5) Primary parties in the relationship
6) No secondary relationships – ( “I like Rush because my hot, hot girlfriend loves Rush. Oh, I just got dumped by that hot, hot now-ex-gf. I don’t listen to Rush any more.” )
7) No asymmetry allowed.
So FB is just spinning their wheels – and yes they are heading to the lowest common denominator as a result.
But their biggest problem is not “Like” v. “Fan”. Their biggest problem is their casual disregard for the social contract they had with their users – not the legal TOS. But the unwritten social contract that was expressed in the marketing message and the way people use FB.
FB is stomping all over that social contract with their continuous “privacy” tweaks. Anything entered into FB is bound to be revealed by “default” to be public at some point. Go away on vacation for a month and come back and discovered that half your love life has been defaulted to be announced to your manager.
Pat– insightful comment. I’d think that it should replace my original post. I agree that “like” is ambiguous in meaning. Switch it out with “love” to see how it fits. Do you love your wife like you do chocolate ice cream? Even the concept of a “love” button is oversimplification of relationships. Imagine you could navigate through life by pressing buttons indicating sentiment, as opposed to making a meaningful comment. I hope folks leave comments here instead of just hitting “like” on their facebook page.
Hi Dennis —
Thanks for the praise! I went off and made a slightly expanded/edited blog post on this point.
To your last point:
“I’d have to admit that were I Facebook, I’d probably do the same thing. Wouldn’t you?”
Part of the “social contract” is that people that “could” do something – consciously chose NOT to do so even if there is some cost. Craigslist could chose to do many more things to monetize than they are. But Craigslist consciously chooses not to.
The social network sites are the first companies to traffic in people’s personal relationships. FB is not respecting that they are in socially uncharted water. FB is acting like what they are doing has been deemed o.k. by society – when in fact society still has not made a decision.
No one seems to be asking the “Don’t be evil question”. The only question is “Is anyone stopping me?” This is a very sociopathic attitude – dangerous for normal companies, long-term lethal for social networking companies.
Denis thats a great article but it does raise a valid concern about how people make a conscious choice to be a fan or group member but like amounts to a fling…
People have become used to the concept of liking or agreeing to something, but just because im a fan of AT&T doesn’t mean i like AT&T or agree with everything. But as a AT&T subscriber I want the connection to the company and happy to show a public link. The concept of the like may not sit well with all users/fans as it is a drastic change which Facebook users don’t usually react well too….
I can see the logic in their plans to expand the Fan platform to be a module on Facebook connect which can form part of your site or be its own unique micro-site.
The issue around the suggested language means that internal feedback was that its possibly confusing so if this is changing is it really upto the brand to re-educate its possible fans if they click the link or banner what is the action that will result.
People understand being a fan and often can be a fan of two opposing football teams, but they may not like both football teams all the time…
Hi David– good point! The concept of “like”, “love”, and “fanning” now have ambiguous degrees of association on Facebook. Do you “love” your wife as much as you “love” chocolate ice cream? We’re headed towards a general “like” status that people can apply to anything, such that it’s just strong enough for users to say they have a pulse. Lower the bar for emotional connection in an effort to get more participation and this is what you get– a general “yeah, sure” button that you can hit on anything, like pigeons pecking levers. Somehow, there has to be a counterbalancing vote to say what is actually special to you among the thousands of likes.
We need to recognize that what we believe any companies priorities and goals SHOULD be and what their priorities and goals actually are is often miles apart. That is obvious by the changes they make.
AdWords went from a brilliant system that delivered highly relevant advertising for each search which generated consistently strong conversions for advertisers to a system that focuses on quantity over quality, intentionally returns results with poor relevancy and perpetrates distribution fraud on advertisers – by their own design. I explained those changes in my post You Missed the Golden Days of AdWords circa 2003.
Google’s CEO has publicly stated that he plans to “clean up” the Internet by favoring brands: “Brands are how you sort out the cesspool“.
AdWords was once excellent for small businesses and could be again IF they had any interest in doing so.
Why should Facebook be any different? When analyzing their actions one must first determine what their TRUE goals are. They are not going to be what they SAY they are but there will be clues in what they say.
Hi Gail,
For some reason, your comment was in my spam folder. So glad that I checked! I totally agree that brands are the trust filter for advertising– such that good brands effectively get favorable treatment for good behavior. And why shouldn’t they– isn’t that how it works in the real world, too? I’m excited by all the new social advertising options now coming into play.
I love your article on the Golden Days of AdWords, which was before the days of default options that maximized the performance of Google’s earnings and not necessarily your conversions. I welcome new players from Facebook and Apple to keep Google and the other ad channels on their feet!
Add me to the not really excited by facebooks idea of social … like most powerful things and FB is definitely one of the tech gods of the internet now. They leave alot to be desired … from all perspectives. Facebooks main concern is facebook of course, anything and everything else comes in a distant second.
Dont see so much significance in their changing fan to like, kind of splitting hairs imo. Know I dont like facebook though … not even sure how they qualify as a social network .. since Ive been told contacting people you dont know is against their TOS … they are full of themselves. Trashed privacy for their users, took away contests and promotions for the fan pages admins … w/o facebks mighty approval being given o course ( now coming out with place pages )
Facebk obviously thinks its too big to fail and we can all diligently follow their rules and embrace whatever changes they decide to make … or go home. 🙂 The sun that all our pathetic lives rotate around.
As an internet marketer I find them frustrating and annoying … but with over 500mil and growing. Also find them a necessary evil … shrugs. Ahhh arrogant corp greed at its best, gotta luv it.
Keep hoping it falls on its face … kind of rooting for a reemergence of myspace or summin … at least they gave their users a ridiculous amount of control over “theirspace” on the web. Odd thought, think myspace was ahead of its time … had it come out a few years later. When highspeed internet was more widely available … and other advances in IT … software/hardware. The dreaded myspace bloat … wouldntve been such a big deal for people.
Which myspace is still a major player in the soc net arena. Could cross our fingers and hope something better emerges to beat them all out. That actually operates in a social way with its users, for its users. Watching FB scramble to come up with each and every way possible to monetize the site … makes me dizzy sometimes.
As for google adwords … with all the local listings changes … who knows where it’ll end ?
Sheesh they recently announced 2 million local SMB’s took them up on it, around 1 in 10 !??!! Might be the info-age where data moves at the speed of light. But apparently alot of people are stuck in the slow lane.
Makes me think of an old saying … power corrupts, absolute power … corrupts absolutely. For better or worse when talking about google or facebk … in terms of the internet they are all powerful entities. We must all tremble at their every utterance and adjust to their whim.
Mr. Smith– thanks for the comment. The great thing about creating your own site is that you can mostly do whatever you want with it (subject to whatever laws). Thus, if you can build the next Facebook, you can decide what you want to do– it’s an economic incentive to everyone out there to be an entrepreneur. That’s how owning a site vs advertising are fundamentally different. I have to give kudos to Zuckerberg for at least that.