Significance of Facebook’s ‘like’ button and its value for brands and pages

Welcome to the digital era, where we have bid farewell to old marketing tools. Now brands successfully promote themselves by using social media platforms, especially with the help of Facebook pages. If you are a social media enthusiast, you might be familiar with the marketing tactics used by brands over social media networks. As of today, the ultimate gauge of a company’s social media marketing skills is how many ‘likes’ they have on their Facebook page. Almost all of us are aware of the ‘like’ button introduced by Facebook and its significance. Not merely an expression of a user appreciating a post, it’s actually something more than that. Technology has now changed the way we market our products in front of the customers.

So how does a ‘liked’ post help in attracting more likes for a page? It makes use of a simple privacy feature (applicable at present). Whenever you like or comment on post which has its privacy set to ‘public’, it appears on your timeline as a publicly visible activity. Suppose you come across a post (say, a picture) on a page that you haven’t liked, the post appears in your feed because your friend liked it. In case you find it interesting, you will visit that particular page to see what else it has to offer, and you might also like that page. The next time that page posts something, you’ll like and the activity will appear on your friends’ feeds, and the process continues.

This applies to all public content, so it also works for posts on websites. When you use the ‘like’ button on a website, the activity appears in your feed, and you indirectly promote the website itself. It’s a multiplier effect, when many people will like a post, it will be seen by their friends, ultimately bringing several likes per post. In short, one good post by a page means several likes for the page, or increase in traffic for a website.

Some brand pages have devised their own ways of attracting more likes. For instance, posting a photo and asking “how many likes for this photo?” All that asked for is a click on the divine button. A common Facebook user likes the post, and the magic happens. Recently a page posted a photo, saying “click this photo and press the L key on your keyboard”. Pressing the L key in Facebook is a shortcut to like the post. Everyone being curious, the photo ends up getting hundred of likes, ultimately getting the page more likes. Clever indeed!

This brief explanation might have helped you understand the importance of the ‘Like’ trend. So keep liking posts as you normally do. However, if you are a brand page owner, you can use the like button to promote yourself instantly. Many people are now using multiple Gmail accounts to create plenty of fake Facebook accounts and pages, which is not ethical by any means.

Remember, a page’s success isn’t reflected by the number of Likes it has, but by the number of Likes it retains. So, no matter how many Likes you have, what really matters is the content you share with the world, and the number of Likes you manage to build.