This past weekend, I gave a talk on using social media to 6,000+ business owners in Miami, Florida. If there was one thing that I took away from the 2011 Market America World Conference, it’s that a lot of people are confused about how the Facebook ‘like’ button actually works and what it can do for their business.
Most of the people I spoke with had not yet liked their favorite brands because they didn’t want people in their network seeing they liked a particular page. Not sure why anyone would not want to like their favorite brands or company, but to help everyone out, here is a breakdown on the like button and how it works for everyone so that you can begin to harness the importance of liking content and how this displays on your Facebook profile.
What is the Facebook ‘like’ button?
The Facebook like button is a way to tell your friends what type of content that you like.
Where can I find a Facebook ‘like’ button?
Blogs/blog posts
When clicked on a blog, the Facebook like button posts on your Facebook profile for all of your friends to see.
Ex: Christian Karasiewicz liked How to use QR Codes on ma Blog.
How to use QR Codes would link to the blog article. ma Blog would link to the website.
Facebook pages – Christian Karasiewicz
When you click the like button on a Facebook page, what this does is tell your friends that you like a particular company, brand, person, etc…
What you will see: when you like a Facebook page, this tells Facebook to send updates done by a particular Facebook page to your newsfeed. This information is not visible to your friends until you take an additional action by clicking that you like a specific post, comment on it, or share it.
What your friends see: your friends initially see that you liked the name of the page. They do not see the content from that page unless they like the page too.
Ex: Christian Karasiewicz likes Market America
Facebook newsfeeds
When you click the like button on a particular item in your Facebook newsfeed, all of your friends will then receive an update in their newsfeed that you liked something. This could be a Facebook page, a status update, photo, video, etc…
Ex: Christian Karasiewicz likes #marketamerica owners, @jrridinger & @lorenridinger featured in @miamiherald via Market America
Why you should like content and how you can benefit from doing this
The whole point of Facebook as a social network, is to share social media content (photos, videos, status updates, blog posts, etc…) with your network. In-turn, when you like content, Facebook will recommend friends to you as well that liked similar content. This is a great tool for helping you expand your network (and fast).
Facebook pages are also important because as business owners, you need to be passionate about the brands you sell. A lot of times, companies and individual brands post their updates via their Facebook page. If you didn’t like their page, you could be severely missing out on deals on particular products, new press and announcements from your favorite brands.
As business owners, it is also important to become an advocate of a particular brand or company – why? By becoming an advocate, you stand to benefit from spreading the word to others because the more people know about something, the more they will seek out others that are also passionate about it — the whole social media effect you know?
So there you have it – the Facebook like button and how you can benefit from it.
Want to get started using the ‘like’ button? Click the like button on my note so that your friends can read about it too – it is that easy!