Think before you like

I added a like button to my website, but I don’t see anywhere that I can admin or even see all the people who liked my website. I can only some of the people who like my site and I’m trying really hard to see who liked my site. Can you help me?

@Justin Kistner So, did you find out, if the like button combines likes by domain?

interesting … will have to think twice before informing clients that this can be done … because for sure they will want to do it, whether they should or not

Hello there!
In the very first days everything was fine with the admin pages, but since about a week, there is a big difference between the like counter on the page, and the admin page fans. I mean, on a blog post I see: you and 54 people liked this page, the I click on admin page, and there I see only 10 fans. Do you have the same issue, or it’s only me?
Have a nice day

Some very interesting information coming out here! Man, I had no idea how deep this rabbit hole went!! I’m hearing some interesting information about single page vs. multiple pages. EdgeRank News Feed optimization. And sounds like we need to do some testing to confirm scenarios.

I smell algo cracking and the true emergence of SSO…

I also noticed this behavior, but I deleted the pages per article. One page to take care of is more than enough.
I don’t understand why do you say in your article that “there is an admin page viewable only to the object owner (me in the case of this blog post)”. They look like any other Fan page to me, and also have tabs for other people to post content to the wall.

@JC John Sese Cuneta did you actually test the fact that the ‘article’ type doesn’t generate a new fan page? The documentation doesn’t mention any difference between these properties.

J,

yeah, really interesting. I’d like to know if a single object can have multiple attributes…Facebook Mobile article, marketing best practices webinar, ipad how-to video…

Also, has our ability to send targeted status updates changed at all? It used to be city, state, gender I think. This new paradigm, as you shared earlier, requires more robust tools (management, measurement and CRM) — either provided by Fb or third parties.

Marko, it does sound like that’s what JC is saying. Raises an interesting strategy question for when you would/wouldn’t want to stratify. Like, what if we organized likes based on categories. That way everyone who likes our social media could be targeted separately from those who like optimization.

Maybe that makes most sense to do as a segmenting action on a single group of users. Unless it’s not possible.

Will need to do additional investigation to surface best practices for marketers.

@JC John Sese Cuneta, that’s very useful information, thank you for sharing!!

Hmm, a question, why do you prefer to have an admin-page per post instead of site-wide?

There’s an og:type property, what I did was:
For my frontpage/mainpage, I set it up as “website” or “blog”. Anyone who likes my “website” is then liking my object. I also get the “Admin” link.

For all posts, I set it up as og:type article. This still gives my visitors the ability to “like” my posts but it doesn’t create an “Admin (page)” per article – which if you claim it all, your facebook will have a lengthy “Like Page” claims

I am assuming of course you intentionally setup your blog like that – one “Like Page” / “Admin (page)” per article/post.

Sadly, despite having the correct Facebook meta tags in place, I don’t see admin links on our own Like buttons.

That makes it hard for me to test the utility of this. I mean, I already have a fan page. I already post to the wall of that page all the stories that we publish. Those go out to my fans’ news feeds — though exactly what goes seems to depend on Facebook itself.

So with this change, it sounds like I’m now getting a fan page for any page on my site that someone likes — with a collection of fans just for that page — who I can now send messages to.

That’s not that useful. If they’ve liked my page, they’ve already seen it. I don’t need to flow it out into their news feed.

If they’re not already fans of the overall site, that’s awesome — except if the only way to reach them is to then go to each individual subfan page, so to speak. Then that’s too much work to be useful.

Hope to get it going to test soon.

Justin, I was saying the exact same thing with regards to CAN-SPAM earlier today in a magazine interview. How long can we automatically opt-in customers when the spirit of the law clearly dictates otherwise? Just because the letter of the law currently addresses email, that doesn’t mean that it can’t and won’t be expanded to include new forms of communications.

All of us should be shaming (and urging) FB to stop adopting policies that invite the FTC or congress to step in and create a highly regulated environment. Several Senators have already expressed interest in following up on FB privacy changes.

The people who create laws will likely have very little understanding of how social networks operate and might just create regulations that would prevent or hamper the growth of asymmetrical networks such as Twitter, Delicious, FriendFeed, and many others.

It would suck if we could no longer follow anyone we wanted just because Facebook regularly abused the concept of opt in – and I think FB already has. Is there a way to opt out of being connected to pages and posts on the Web short of tracking down the original page where a user has “liked” something and de-liking it? I’m guessing there is not.

Addendum: the really dumb thing is that they don’t need to grant Page Owners the ability to message in the newsfeed for Facebook to monetize the “graph of likable objects.”

In fact it would likely have an adverse impact on the larger market (said graph), as it reduces incentives to “like” things (don’t want to spam up my feed).

The lameness (and craziness) of this blows my tiny pea brain to bits.

Carri, great suggestion on updating the post with the graphic in the comments. I’ll do that.

I’ve been talking with our Director of Marketing here at Webtrends, Marko. We’ve been thinking it might be a good idea to start voluntarily doing double opt-in methods. It seems inevitable that the Can Spam Act of 2003 will come to social, doesn’t it?

Justin, great post and GREAT discussion here. This is more helpful than any half-baked, infrequently updated info that Facebook has dispensed.

I think you should add your comment with graphics about the back-end admin looks for multiple blog posts to your original post. A picture says a thousand words.

What I’m struggling with now is how to articulate some kind of privacy policy to blog and website viewers/users to hopefully mitigate any blowback that happens once the non-geeks and marketers realize that Facbook has shanghaied and shared their data.

As a marketer, I certainly see the opportunities in what I’ll call “tentacle targeting” but I’m also very cautious. I don’t think tricking people to opt in or abusing the privilege of communicating with them is in the best interests of marketers. I want clients to be respectful of why social networking users signed up on the first place and be judicious about outreach. It’s no different than smart strategies for email outreach. There’s a thin line between keeping customers informed and spamming them — and that line is different for every user and every marketer.

@CarriBugbee
Social profiles: http://www.CarriBugbee.com

@Tim Baker, go to http://www.facebook.com/insights/ and there is a “Insights for your Domain” button. It gives you a meta tag to place in your web page header that identifies you as the owner.

“I imagine most people who own the objects that people are liking don’t know about their ability to message the likers.”

Pages cannot message the users. They can send page updates (which are stored in a separate folder in the inbox and, in my totally unscientific research, I’ve found that most users don’t even know page updates exist), and they can content that may or may not appear on a user’s news feed.

A couple of things that you could have also picked up from f8…

1.) The Top News feed filters out information that is not relevant to users. Top News filters by user affinity (how often the reader interacts with the post’s author), weight of the edge type (what kind of content it is, be it photos, video, or text) based on the types of content that the reader interacts with, and time decay (how old the edge is).

2.) On any given day, only half of users use the “Most Recent” view of the News Feed.

3.) The Most Recent view by default only displays content from 250 users that Facebook’s algorithm consider to be most relevant to the reader.

So how do users deal with this “issue?” They do what they would do anyway: they ignore the content. When users ignore content published by the pages with which they’re connected, the user affinity score between that user and the publisher goes down. When the user affinity score drops too low, coupled with the edge type and age of the content, that publisher will quite literally fall of of that user’s news feed.

And if that’s not good enough, there’s always one other quick fix… “Hide.” It takes time to hide a page that is publishing to your news feed than it does to go to that page and unlike it. You maintain your connection to that page and they can no longer publish stories that may show up on your news feed. I don’t see a problem.

Remember that you can only see the link you describe to admin the resulting page if you have set the fb:admins meta property in your source code. Many of the blogs out there that are implementing the like feature are WordPress blogs using the FB Like plugin. The plugin doesn’t set the fb:admins property and many casual bloggers and marketers aren’t as web savvy as you are, so they will never see the “admin page” link that you and I have.

And lastly, I don’t believe that individual articles were never meant to be an open graph object. Marketers thought the “like” button was meant to function in the same way it does with content on Facebook–a “tip of the hat” to the content creator. Facebook could have done a MUCH better job of introducing the open graph concepts and how objects were meant to be interacted with before rolling out the plugins. Ergo, marketers bastardized the idea of the Like plugin and Facebook added an “article” og:type to make up for it.

I consider it a moot point. Users MAY be irritated to see content from pages that they inadvertently “liked,” but the likelihood of seeing that content is slim. The average user has 130 friends and 50% of users log in daily. The average user publishes 70 pieces of content each month. Working out the numbers, a user is potentially exposed to 151 news feed stories a day from their friends alone. To even SEE your update, your content needs to be 1.) important enough to pass the Edge Rank filtering algorithm or 2.) published at a time when your readers are looking at their Most Recent news feed view (which only half of readers do anyway).

As marketers, our content really isn’t as pervasive as we’d like to think it is. Here’s a post I wrote last week on the behaviour you’re describing and why it’s a kick in the face for Page admins: http://www.webmarketingnerd.com/archives/why-news-feed-optimization-just-got-much-more-important

The privacy issues are screwed, but the Like is in inspired. The Like feature encourages you to Like a Company rather than Become A Fan. The wording makes it more accessible and down to earth. Newbies will adopt it more quickly.

The Privacy issues on the otherhand are where they have got it wrong. They are offending people by posting private wall comments in public timelines. This is against business rules “of if it is not broke why fix”.

I’m sorry but is it really that confusing?.
I agree with Crystal that this is just the “Become a Fan” button but with a new name and positioned outside of Facebook.

before, when you become a fan in FB you gave permissión to that Fan Page to show their updates in your news feed…how is this different from that aside from being outside of FB? why is it causing so much confusion? :S

Pretty messed up. Makes me wonder how often people with these admin capabilities actually utilize it. And what kind of negative reaction from consumers it has.

I have tested social engineering to artificially increase the LIKE count. Using CSS positioning you can ask “Do you [LIKE] CNN?” & post it on your own site. Users will click anything.

I am for sure not going to “LIKE” the story, so I’ll RT it instead.

Nevermind, I’m an idiot.

The answer is, “yes, you’re going to have an ‘army’ of likable objects.”

http://blogs.webtrends.com/blog/2010/05/06/an-army-of-likable-objects-the-new-facebook-marketing-strategy/

Crystal, this isn’t the Like button on a Fan Page. This is a Like Button on my blog post. We now have many “pages” now that are not publicly viewable. It’s a huge change that I learned about from the f8 conference

Although there were many changes at F8, this isn’t one of them. It’s been this way for a long time, since before it was renamed from “Become Fan” to “Like.”

@Ethan – No, it doesn’t allow them to post to your wall, just generate a message that shows up in the news feed. Those are different types of content.