If you were under a rock yesterday, Facebook announced new Facebook Like buttons that, according to founder Mark Zuckerberg, will sprout on a billion pages by, well, now. But what about all those Facebook Share buttons that we were told to put on all our pages. Pull them down? Keep them up? So far, it looks like you want them both.
Here’s a look at how the buttons work on my own blog, which you can find at the bottom of this page:
At the top is the new Facebook Like button, which I added using this WordPress plugin. It’s pretty rudamentary, but it’s something — especially given that WordPress apparently didn’t get a lot of Facebook love in yesterday’s rollout.
At the bottom is the “old” Facebook Share button, which I’ve enabled using a plug-in called Digg Digg. That plug-in also lets me create buttons for Google Buzz and Twitter, which are on either side of the Facebook button.
Do I still need the Share button? To help decide, I both Liked and Shared something.
For the item that I shared, I got the option to add a custom note and select a thumbnail before sharing:
For the item I liked, I got none of that. It was far faster to do than sharing. But Liking the item just caused the Like button to show my image below it, at least on the page itself:
What happened on Facebook? Here’s how they both look on my personal wall:
You can see the item that I shared looks great. It has my custom note. The thumbnail makes it stand out. In contrast, the item that I liked feels like an afterthought.
As a marketer, that’s a big issue. From what I can tell, from a visibility standpoint, you’d rather have people Share items than Like them.
Then again, visibility is far more than what happens on your personal wall. As a marketer, you really want someone to Share an item so that it flows from that person out to their friends, appearing in their News Feed — the list of items that you see when you’re logged into Facebook or go back to the Facebook home page after being logged in.
I don’t have a good answer yet on what happens with Liked items. In one specific and fast test with my technical director at Search Engine Land, Michelle Robbins, she could see my shared item in her own news feed but not the item that I liked. In my own news feed — which is a bad test of what others see — it was nevertheless the same. I could see my shared item but not my liked item.
The one difference was for Liked “fan pages.” I use the quotes, because I’m not even sure if there’s still called Fan Pages with all the changes. These are pages that people (like myself, my fan page is here) or companies (like Search Engine Land, which has a page here) create that act like personal profiles but don’t require approval for anyone to follow.
If you like a fan page, that seems to show up in news feeds of your friends. Here’s an example from my own news feed, of someone who Liked some pages, causing me to be informed (I’ve deleted their name):
Many sites already had installed boxes asking people to become a fan, as I have over on the right hand side of pages on Daggle or that we have on Search Engine Land, like this:
Here’s something I found odd. If you’re already a fan, the only way you know this is that the Like button gets darker:
That’s not really intuitive that you’re already a fan. So someone might click on that — and if they do, bummer — they’re dropped from the fan page. Or unliked. Or whatever, it’s dumb.
Meanwhile, there’s supposed to be all these stats that those who put up Like buttons are going to get. Or something like that. I need to do some more digging. What I know so far is that after installing a Like button for Daggle, there was nothing that gave me stats on Facebook. Just putting up that button created nothing to give me ownership of stats there.
With Search Engine Land, I’ve already had stats on Likes in the past — so those will continue. But I suspect I’m only seeing Likes for the fan page, not for individual items.
More later — and if you know more, please share!
Postscript: Adam Sherk in the comments below points to a great article, With the Open Graph Protocol, Any URL Can Be Treated Just Like a Facebook Page, from Inside Facebook. The Like button can also be implemented as an XFBML tag that allows you to add a comment (but not a thumbnail), it sees.
That comment is really necessary if you want the story published as a “full story” in a news feed, rather than a single line, the story says. I’m not sure what a “full” story means, however — but I assume it makes things look more Share-like.
As for stats, if you add some meta tags to your pages, you can assign them to an existing Facebook application you manage and get Fan-page like stats. I’m going to experiment with this — sounds like a nice WordPress plug-in that inserts that information side-wide would be useful. Actually, any plug-in that allow you to insert custom meta tags should do the job.
{ 16 comments… read them below or add one }
I think this is a great move for Facebook’s end for more effective targeting and more detailed information about the site’s users without compromising privacy.
Meanwhile, I do feel with the ’share’ option, end users will be more inclined to use and share with their network.
Brian
@ezas123
When you first like the button your given the option to share it to your profile.
Additionally, you can add Open Graph tags to your page and then when you a user Likes something(say a movie) it goes to their favorite movies section. You can also update the stream of whoever Liked your page with new content using og tags.
Still wrapping my head around everything.
Geat article Danny,
Have to say I’m a bit disappointed with how “ike” appears in the teamline – I can’t see that really prompoting and helpiing virally spread the message – share is much more powerful for this.
To me the like button is much more for the benefit of Facebook – feeding their database which advertisers etc are clammering for.
Interesting comment about from Miguel though – what he says seems to open a few more doors and perhaps make like more powerful
@joel_hughes
In reading this Inside Facebook post it looks like if you implement the like button with an XFBML tag users can also add a comment when they like the page. But I agree the share button creates a much more compelling entry.
Interesting analysis Danny.
And thanks for sharing the plugins you use.
I added the Like button plugin and the Digg-Digg plugin to my site, and again appreciate you mentioning them.
I’ve noticed, though, in doing a Page Speed test that my HTTP requests have gone up by a huge amount, with the analyzer “thinking” that I have 16 external stylesheets (I also use Thesis, so the count is only 3). Here is what one such, listed as
http://static.ak.fbsdn.net/rsrs.php/zBN75/hash/215pb0fx.cssin the analysis:Server Apache/1.3.41.fb2
Last-Modified Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 GMT
X-Cnection close
Content-Type text/css; charset=utf-8
Content-Encoding gzip
Content-Length 1933
Vary Accept-Encoding
Cache-Control public, max-age=31210742
Expires Tue, 19 Apr 2011 19:15:32 GMT
Date Fri, 23 Apr 2010 13:36:30 GMT
Request Headersview source
Host static.ak.fbcdn.net
User-Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2.4) Gecko/20100413 Firefox/3.6.4 GTB7.0
Accept text/css,*/*;q=0.1
Accept-Language en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive 115
Connection keep-alive
Referer http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.keenerliving.com%2Flife-as-a-challenge&layout=standard&show-faces=true&width=450&action=like&font=arial&colorscheme=light
Based on this fact alone, I may give the Like Button plugin up. I do not know if using the XFBML method would overcome this or not. Given that excess HTTP requests are probably the biggest enemy of speedy pages, I now have some misgivings about the Like Plugin.
I think the like button has more power to viralise. Why? The brand can pre-set the thumbnail, it´s quicker and easier for the user, and the experience of seeing your friends face flash up on the brand page is more powerful than viewing the social proof on the FB site. If you´re the first of your social set to like the content, then the experience is not so compelling. But revisit a page (when you failed to logout of FB) during another sitting from same browser when your social set has also liked it and boom, all your mates are visible on the brands´ page. You get the social proof hit right there, sans pop up fuss of the share experience.
Many of the early examples out there are using just the iframe version which lacks the potency of hardcoded XFBML setup. It´s upto the devs to implement it the best way.
Perhaps it depends on how that Like button has been configured Danny. I responded to a tweet (from someone I admire a bit, but don’t really know) asking people to test his Like button. I did so (I’m so obedient lol) and clicking it took me to his facebook page. I noticed just now that he’s deleted his request for people to “test” his Like button for him the sneaky so-an-so
Share button has a richer experience for a user because you get thumbs and you can add your own comments therefore pulling extra attention to it for your friends. I’ve see some boring links on my feed, eventual the were boring, but at first with the comment of my friend who posted it made me wanna watch it.
What not all users know is that Like’s are all organized on your FB, so it’s sort sort of a Digg thing, but at this moment implementing Like and Share will just add another distraction point for the users. Do i like it? Ya.. But do i wanna share it with my friends? Ya.. So what to use?
By placing only the share button you simplify the experience.
No offence mate, but I am a lil bit more confused about the like buttons and fshare buttons after reading your article
I am going to install like buttons anyway. Will see
I think the power of “Like” has yet to be seen, as we’re still in the early phases of adoption. More and more sites are moving away from 5 star ratings to simply “Like” or “Dislike.” YouTube, for example.
Certainly, the creation of the off-site “Like” button is a feather in Facebook’s cap. In doing so, they’ve begun building a database of “Liked” urls that could easily be used to power a social search engine. In contrast to Google Search that uses backlinks (amongst other factors) to determine a webpage’s worth, Facebook has essentially developed their own social web scoring algorithm. The next logical step is for Facebook to introduce “Social Search.”
This puts Google at a disadvantage. In order to fully evaluate a webpage’s worth, they really need access to this social data. In order to achieve this, Google needs more skin in the social networking game. After the lackluster response to Google Buzz, my guess is that this will happen via acquisition of one of the larger social networks.
Thinking longer-term, if the social networks do indeed become the focal point for Search, then their stock just went up significantly.
@Paul Gailey
You’ve been able to specify what image gets used as the thumbnail for web pages shared on Facebook for ages, just use this tag in the head of your page:
Full info here: http://www.charlesneville.com/2009/10/optimise-for-facebook/
I have also done some limited testing and I’m not seeing any ‘I Like’ items (other than fan pages) appearing in a distributed News Feed.
Given that we primarily use these for distribution, if this is true then the ‘I Likes’ value is a fraction on the ‘Share’ value.
Has anyone seen an instance where ‘I Like’ activity was actually from a 3rd party site was actually distributed across a FB user’s news feed?
Me i am just a learning, so i am going to install both of them and see what happens thank you for your post
I’ve already use facebook Like button into my page GoenduL.Netbut, I have a little trouble about the width size that is not matching with my blog post. Can I use it with simple thumbs button only?
I’m late to the party, but here’s what I’m gathering:
– “Share” works great for news, headlines, articles, announcements, and most types of content within a site
– “Like” makes sense for an entire brand: a website, a movie, a musician.
I would share an article from your site; I would like your entire site. I would share the announcement that Band X’s CD just came out, but I would like Band X.
The confusing part is that the format is flexible enough that you can sort of use both for content or brands. Also, Facebook would prefer if we all used “Like” for everything, because then every page on our sites runs JavaScript from the Facebook servers, which basically gives them access to all the data that Google Analytics gets with the same method…except Google Analytics defines privacy for that data, and I don’t think Facebook does.