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.

Singapore, a country with an electorate of no bigger than 3 million, is heading towards polling day on 7 May 2011. While the last general election in 2006 saw little use of social media (with the exception of blogs), the general election this year is heavily influenced by social media, in particular Facebook. Voters and candidates alike are using Facebook for political campaigning in unimaginable ways, including using business cards with Facebook skin and creating fake profiles to give the impression of a more balanced distribution of support for the two sides.

One notable phenomenon on Facebook is the rise of Nicole Seah, a 24-year-old candidate from a non-leading opposition party with little work experience whatsoever, who has won more than 42,000 fans in a span of less than two weeks. These numbers may not sound impressive, but consider that Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and John F. Kennedy all baked into one super-strongman, has a Facebook page that garners about 55,000 fans over several years. Nicole is currently the second most-Liked politician in Singapore:

Facebook may be the very reason that this year’s general election may turn out to be very different – it already is very different in terms of its build-up. More voters are using Facebook to write political Notes that are shared publicly, and real-time data and communication allow for a scalable way of spreading information through Pages and status updates. Information spreads like wildfire, and, in a city-state with high IT-literacy, the state-backed mainstream media might find itself increasingly irrelevant.

Ultimately, Facebook seriously increases political awareness and engagement among voters. It inspires emboldenment, by allowing like-minded people to gain idea validation, it brings to light issues of concern (e.g. alternative policies, voting secrecy, political scandals), and it fuels activism, something that the generally-passive Singaporean population is often accused of being incapable of. In a way, Facebook is also a leveler of the political battlefield, given that the incumbent government would find it very hard to regulate the flow of information on a third-party platform hosted in the US.

Will some votes swing because of Facebook? No doubt. The question is, as with online marketing, to what extent online metrics, such as shares, Likes, number of comments, etc., are correlated with results (be it the number votes or online purchases).

How sticky a social network is is largely determined by the size of the network as well as the quality of user experience. If Friendster could lose its edge due to spam, Facebook – essentially a better version of Friendster – should be extremely wary about the spam problem. Recently, there have been reports on Facebook Likejacking (e.g. here and here), which involves a user going to a website, doing anything but clicking a Like button and yet finding a “Like” post on her Facebook profile several seconds later. Basically, this is clickjacking applied to Facebook.

The change in the behavior of the Like button is extremely advantageous to malicious developers who want to engineer their own viral marketing campaign. While the Like button previously posted a one-line text update to one’s profile when clicked, it now posts a full-blown link sharing update with a thumbnail, description, etc. All a developer needs to do is to somehow get visitors to click on a Like button, which can be craftily hidden using CSS/Javascript code. The most common technique that we have witnessed so far is to get visitors to click on a video thumbnail with a play button.

Likejacking is problematic, because it defaces user profiles and reduces signal-to-noise ratio on Facebook. For Facebook to maintain its lead in social networking, it should continually ensure that the basics, such as a spam-free environment, are taken care of. One simple solution on how to tackle the problem is to leverage on the crowd to annotate particular posts as Likejacking spam, so that Facebook can ban certain URLs or prohibit certain websites from utilizing the Facebook Like plug-in. Instead Facebook took another route.

Have you experienced Likejacking? How do you think it will change Facebook?

Social media marketers in general are fond of garnering more Likes for their Facebook Pages or web pages, in hopes of either providing social proof through sheer number of fans or amassing subscribers to be fed announcements, promotions, offers, and contests. Clearly, there is some evidence bolstering the effectiveness of these tactics (see SocialCommerceToday.com’s latest article on social commerce statistics), but, as with any prudent use of social media marketing tools and technologies, what really matters is not adoption or user behavior but ROI. The key question is still, “How many dollars am I getting back for every dollar I sink into this channel?”

There are many use cases for the Facebook Like button (to create a viral group deal solution, for instance), but consider the following points before adopting a “the more, the merrier” strategy with Facebook:

1. The number of subscribers alone is not ROI. It is helpful to view Facebook Pages as websites. Facebook Likes are somewhat analogous to traffic, and engagement (i.e. the act of actually following your updates) is somewhat analogous to conversion. Focusing on improving the Like count without ensuring that there is a valuable offering or content to drive engagement and action is, needless to say, a wasteful strategy. Of course, as Sean Ellis said, we should focus only on channel building or channel optimization at a time and never do both concurrently. The point, however, is that engagement is a crucial marketing component that is often overlooked.

2. The “social” context of Facebook is not conducive for commercial offerings. Our view has always been that “commercial social” is unlikely to work on a big scale, because it does not add value to the core purpose of Facebook: to stay connected with the people whom we love and care. This is a major pitfall of commercializing social media: unlike search engines, showing ads and offers is not contextually relevant and interferes with the socializing process. Search engines, on the other hand, are used to answer questions, and, often enough, ads are the answers to said questions. Social recommendations are only likely to work if it has some contextual relevance factor working in its favor.

3. Users click the Facebook Like button for different reasons. It has been reported that 40% of consumers Liked a company, brand, or association on Facebook to receive discounts and promotions (ExactTarget, September 2010) [1], while nearly 40% of consumers Liked companies on Facebook to publicly display their brand affiliation to friends. (ExactTarget, October 2010) [2]. Depending on how you interpret the statistics, they can mean different things. One possible interpretation: the majority of consumers who Liked a brand did not care about discounts and promotions (from [1]), while nearly 40% of consumers Liked a company merely for a social reason – to garner peer approval (from [2]). Any prudent marketer knows that assuming worst-case scenario is a standard procedure in the decision-making process.

4. Facebook is biased towards its own users. It is baffling that many agencies, companies, and brands are ready to expend top dollars on even buying Facebook Likes. Clearly, this method is the ultimate shortcut to Facebook list-building, but consider that Facebook makes it very convenient for users to unlike a Facebook Page or a web page (look at the tiny X on the top-right corner of each post). Unlike Friendster, Facebook knows that spam kills and kills quickly.

5. Facebook Likes are only useful if they are not used solely as social currency. The concept of social currency states that brands and companies will offer something valuable in exchange for sharing said offer or company via social media by users. We have previously explored the use of Facebook Likes as social currency (here and here) and opined that anything achieved through compulsion is unlikely to produce returns. Also, unlike cash, Facebook Likes and Tweets are also very easy to take back. The problem is that the social currency model is becoming increasingly common (e.g. “Like this Page first for...”) and is sometimes even the core fan acquisition strategy.

In the final analysis, the real value of Facebook lies in its user base and mass distribution model for content. However, a user base is just that: a market, which may or may not be easy to penetrate or engage. Although trite, the key to effective Facebook marketing is to attach an actionable metric to every tactic that measures ROI directly. Perhaps even buying fans is a highly-viable fan acquisition strategy; all we have to do is to look at the numbers and then decide.

A recent article by Techcrunch revealed that Facebook Shares are worth nearly three times as much as Tweets when it comes to social commerce. After using both Facebook and Twitter for more than a year, we at Zuupy do not find the statistics surprising, considering that Facebook has the significant advantage of leveraging on our real-life social graph to empower our purchases while Twitter merely relies on our interest graph. Alas, for Twitter, we are still more likely to trust a friend than an industrial expert or celebrity.

One implication of these findings is that Tweets will be perceived as less valuable as social currency. The reason is pretty obvious: the Twitter experience is horrid. First, for professional networking, Twitter generally comprises a body of self-serving broadcasters who are constantly pushing out content of their own and increase their follower count without any intention whatsoever to engage with their followers. Second, the text-only, 140-character nature of Twitter lost its novelty after a while, and, despite recent attempts to support multimedia from Twitter.com itself, it is still a slow and cumbersome process to consume content on Twitter. Even the infamous one-liner updates achieved via Facebook Likes monetize better than Tweets.

The lesson for us is clear: focus on Facebook first, and then explore Twitter. Google recently announced its social search feature, which, although more focused on Twitter than Facebook (Facebook profiles are not crawlable after all), underscores the importance of the social graph in empowering search results. In general, especially with consumers, “Facebook is the people you went to high school with. Twitter is the people you wish you went to high school with.”

Also, with recent studies showing that Facebook social commerce is really about deals and not engagement, the lesson for us is perhaps to focus on Facebook and deals simultaneously. Indeed, the launch of our latest competitor, CrowdBunny, provides testament to the opportunities available in the area of Facebook group buying. We have launched a couple of months before them, and we are just excited to see some validation in terms of competitors entering the space. We see social commerce as focusing on Facebook and group deals in the near future, as evidenced by our Facebook group buying solution. What do you think social commerce will look like in the near future?

The definition of social commerce that we are most familiar with here at Zuupy is that of consumers helping one another to make better buying decisions. Although the most common way of introducing social into commerce is using love-based product recommendations (e.g. Blippy, ShopSocial.ly, Facebook’s new ad system), another potentially-valuable strategy is to facilitate hate-based social commerce. Of course, promoting negativity seems antithetical to good business sense, but it is arguable that some, possibly many, consumers see their friends as not a go-to source for product recommendations, but a checkpoint for “buyer beware” information.

Promoting hate is certainly damaging to business reputation, but consider Boutiques.com, one of Google’s first forays into social commerce, where consumers are allowed to literally hate a product. While Facebook’s content curation strategy is solely based upon Likes or endorsements, Google’s social commerce content curation strategy seems to be based on both Likes and Hates. Hatred per se is unconstructive, but substantiated negative comments about a product can be very valuable information to consumers that most platforms or merchants neglect to provide.

In our opinion, the new form of community voting (for lack of a better term) based solely on saccharine-sweet Facebook Likes and other approval signals is less useful than the older system based on ratings and reviews. Just for interest, Amazon has been slow to experiment with Facebook-like community features (e.g. Likes, stories, feeds) and continues to rely on its consumer reviews feature to provide purchase planning information to its customers. We have also previously argued that Facebook Likes alone are useless for any real product research.

Let us promote some hate and see what happens. Has anyone ever run an A/B test that pits an all-rosy product page against an objective product page?

Consumers are not idiots. Let that sink in. When Kanye West and Jay-Z decided to release a new song on Facebook, making access to that song contingent upon liking the song release page, one would think that they would be able to convert a few million of their 11 million existing Facebook fans into liking the new page. It turns out that consumers are no longer that easy to persuade, given that only 80,000 fans actually clicked Like. That, needless to say, is an abysmal hit rate.

A large part of Facebook marketing these days centers around encouraging consumers to share content through a variety of means, from blatantly asking them to share (“share it with your friends if you find it useful/funny”) to meticulously engineering viral loops that sound so good in theory that, if they worked, every employee of that business would be retiring by the next week in Bermuda. Consumers recognize a viral loop when they see one (really), so any overt attempt at making them play along with marketing shenanigans would naturally make the business look desperate and the brand less desirable.

A viral marketing strategy that is increasingly popular is the hostage strategy: if you want X, do Y first. This strategy is possibly the result of countless futile attempts at asking consumers nicely to share things, and, though more and more brands are adopting this approach, it remains unknown if this sort of free marketing actually produces returns. We ourselves use the hostage strategy in building our marketing app, and we have also recently experimented with the game mechanics strategy, i.e. making sharing fun and interactive.

At the end of the day, however, it may be best to revert to a no-nonsense plea to share, once consumers get tired of hostage situations and silly games. What do you think?

Social media sharing was simple back then. It works on a consume-first-share-later model: content providers gave out content for free, and consumers shared said content, if they deemed it worthy of sharing. These days, there seems to be another increasingly popular model, what we call the share-first-consume-later model. Facebook Likes and even tweets are now increasingly used as de facto currency on some content platforms.

In fact, this model is becoming mainstream. TechCrunch recently instituted tweets as a way for their readers to participate in a contest. Effectively, readers are offering tweets as a bribe to gain access to the contest, with TechCrunch merely giving an invitation to treat. Of course, legal technicalities aside, this is a model to which we subscribe, for we also make consumers click on Facebook Like buttons to participate in deals.

The other way of seeing it is that it is the businesses who are bribing consumers with valuable things to get them to Like something, a view adopted by author Nicholas Carr. In illustrating the absurdity of the social media bribery model with a personal analogy, he said, “Back in elementary school, there was this distinctly unlikable kid who, if you agreed to act like his friend for a day, would let you swim in his family's swimming pool.” Perhaps we can all read about his petty musings here and see if he knows what he is talking about.

The original purpose of Facebook Likes and Tweets is, expressly, to share and, impliedly, to show endorsement. Over time, these social media sharing tools have gradually evolved in their application to – in addition to their original purpose – serve as a form of currency for social media marketing. The implication of this shift is that consumers begin to treat sharing things on social media as something not to be given up so easily, particularly when it comes to products and services, or, equally possible, as something to be given up more easily than normal to achieve certain limited ends.

There are several models that use Facebook Likes or Tweets as currency; the Pay with a Tweet model allows consumers to purchase items by “paying” for it via a promotional effort, while Facebook-based deals applications, such as Sears’ WishTogether and Walmart’s CrowdSaver, adopt a Groupon-like model that delivers deals upon the achievement of certain Like thresholds for said deals. Of course, when social media sharing is treated as a medium of trade, the average endorsement value of social media sharing goes down, since the sharer is most likely sharing for a non-endorsement purpose.

It remains to be seen if Likes and Tweets can serve as a viable currency in exchange for goods, services, deals, etc. What is predictable is that social media sharing – especially with regard to ecommerce – will increase in quantity, but decrease in quality, as more people will share for selfish reasons and thus suppress signal-to-noise ratio, arguably one of the most important yardsticks for any social media platform.

Marketers generally view the Facebook Like button in a positive light. It seems to make sense – provide onsite social proof for content or products by displaying the number of Likes as well as bring in new visitors or leads via Facebook itself without additional CPC costs. It is a tiny plug-in that purports to solve (at zero financial cost, no less) the two biggest pain points in online marketing: traffic and conversions.

There are, however, two problems with the Like button, depending on what you use the data for. First, as a marketer, there is little value in knowing who likes what. Many people liberally click the Like button, thus it is a very poor indication of purchase intent or even interest. If they truly like a product, for example, they would have bought it, not play around with a plug-in that adds little direct value to their shopping experience. Second, as a consumer, the number of Likes that a piece of content or a product garnered is useless. Knowing that, say, 16 people like a particular product has no effect on my purchase decision if I cannot know how many people would have disliked it, had there been an option to dislike it. With onsite product reviews, consumers can access and assess the pros and cons of a given product, so there is value in them as a conversion-optimization tool. Likes, conversely, are one-sided, vanity numbers (this is a bold statement coming from me, as I represent a company that offers a decision-making social shopping tool that relies on the number of Likes for purchase planning).

I would have less reason to doubt the Facebook Like button’s value in driving traffic, but, as onsite social proof, the Facebook Like button may be of dubious value. Any consumer who has any semblance of discernment would take the Like count of a piece of content or product with a pinch of salt. The only value that can be derived from the Like count is that of comparison: where many pieces of content or products are juxtaposed, the relative number of Likes may be useful in gauging consumer sentiment.

What do you think of the Facebook Like button?