After more than a year of implementation, the Facebook Like button has pretty much proven itself to be a viable social media marketing tool for online content providers. TechCrunch recently reported that, despite having much less fans on their Facebook account than on their Twitter account, Facebook is sending way more traffic than Twitter (source). Perhaps 140-character limits, shortened links, and lack of multimedia support are not exactly the best conditions that enable effective social media sharing; sharing a la Facebook seems to drive greater engagement after all.

It is reports like this that encourages content providers to focus more on getting people to share their content on Facebook rather than on Twitter; one could argue that a whole art focused on how to get Facebook Likes has emerged. Fan-gating is a popular technique, while other businesses use contests where their fans can upload their own content to be voted on by others – of course, to vote on any piece of content, you have to Like the Facebook Page first. Fashion/apparel brand companies like to run simple contests where their fans can upload pictures of themselves donning clothes of said brand, and whoever garners the most Likes by a closing date wins some vouchers. Participants would naturally pester their friends to Like their picture; however, to Like a picture on a Facebook Page, you need to Like the Facebook Page itself first. Loef recently ran one such gimmick.

Another increasingly popular method is a modified, cliffhanger version of fan-gating. Instead of asking for visitors to Like a Facebook Page or web page upfront, content providers lure people in first by providing great content upfront, building up a story up to a certain semi-climatic point, and then asking for a Like/share upon reaching a cliffhanger. Chinese short story websites and blogs are particularly fond of using this method. The following picture shows an example that helped this simple Chinese short story garner almost 200,000 Likes:

Do you know of any other novel way of garnering Facebook Likes? Or have you tried some methods of your own, which worked or did not work (like ours)? Let us hear about it in the comments section below.