I Like You, But I’m Not a Fan.

If you’ve got a Facebook fan page for your business, you’ve probably noticed that rather than clicking on “Become a Fan,” your page visitors are now clicking on a button that simply says “Like.” Facebook has done this as part of a much bigger empire-growth scheme that allows them to eventually take over the planet, but within our own smaller agenda of social media engagement, they may have just rocked our world.


It’s good, but it could be bad.

So, from an optimistic standpoint, there is something much less psychologically committal about saying you like something than saying you’re a fan. Apparently, Facebook has already proved this with their market analysis. So that’s good, right? More people seeing our news feed, more people to potentially engage with. My hunch, however, is that many Facebook users aren’t taking it seriously. I can’t tell you how many of my own personal friends are now “becoming fans” of the silliest, most useless, controversial, and downright raw pages. Do they know this is coming up in my news feed? My conclusion is that for the past two years, the action of clicking on “Like”  has simply been our way to acknowledge a tongue-n-cheek status update without commenting on it, a way of pointing out that we’ve looked at a picture that was posted, or appreciate someone’s political satire post from a news source. So whereas we business owners and marketers know that this button is just a replacement of the word “Fan,” users overall just don’t recognize the difference.

So it’s bad?

Well, it feels bad. It feels like, at least when it comes to the viral newsfeed phenomenon, Facebook has diluted the power of the fan page and the overall willingness of our fans to ultimately engage with us. My hope is that Facebook users will catch on to the various meanings of the word “Like” throughout the network and adjust back to being more particular about the business pages they want to follow.

Let’s wait and see.

With every change comes opportunity (see last blog post), so let’s work with this. Facebook has given us an opportunity to coin a new term to replace “Become a Fan” in our marketing. I loved this, because it is so actionable! How can we use "Like" in an action statement that doesn’t seem needy? Let’s hear it!