Facebook Pages (like ours!), delivering updates via profile newsfeeds, are a very successful way for businesses and brands to interact with their customers. And unlike FB Profiles, Pages are public, and can be seen by anyone, including Google (which opens up significant SEO opportunities).
Up until now, users have been able to follow those brands that they like by clicking on the brand’s “Become a Fan” button.
According to Facebook, their users click “Like” nearly twice as often as they click “Become a Fan,” so they are changing the “Become a Fan” button to “Like” in hopes that more users will feel inclined to show their affinity towards brands.
Facebook has said that the move of changing “Become a Fan” to “Like” will make users more comfortable with linking up with a brand, since the latter wording seems to carry less of a commitment than the former. (Their ulterior motive, of course if that with increased fans, the people behind Pages will be more inclined to maintain of increase inertia with Facebook Ads. Don’t forget, Facebook is a business.)
“The idea of liking a brand is a much more natural action than (becoming a fan) of a brand,” said Michael Lazerow, CEO of Buddy Media, which helps companies establish their brands and advertise on social networks such as Facebook. “In many ways it’s a lower threshold.”
All that is changing is the language. “The core functionality of Pages will remain unchanged. Pages will still have distribution into News Feed, and the administrators of those Pages will still be able to call the people connected to their Page, ‘fans’,” according to Facebook spokesperson. For both the brand and the customer, nothing is changing except the terminology.
No word yet on how this will affect the Fan Box Widget (right), which is Facebook Connect-enabled social widget that Page owners can add to their websites to allow users to fan and view the accompanying Facebook Page stream. (We’ve added it to at least a dozen of our sites.) With the Fan Box, brands can bring content from their Facebook Page into their website and help convert website visitors into Facebook fans. Users can view the most recent posts from the Page, see a list of other fans (including their friends), and, most importantly, become a fan without leaving the site. Additionally, if a user visits the site and isn’t logged in to Facebook, the user can log in and become a fan directly inline as well.
Our approach to Facebook Fan Pages is unchanged. But we are very interested in how the change in wording might affect the power of the Page.
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All excellent points and concerns. I also think it’s important to remember that Facebook is a company with profit goals. And by flowing more traffic to Pages they are supporting their encouragement for users to purchase advertising to drive people to those Pages. It’s a beautifully-constructed and seductive system. But it’s a closed system, and it’s always important to see where our goals differentiate from Facebook’s.