Facebook "Like" Buttons, Yay or Nay?

Ken's Blog

Is adding a Facebook "like" button to your site a worthwhile strategy?

YAY or NAY?

Well, here are the referrals from Facebook since starting a test on anguilla-beaches.com on May 1...

April -- 35
May -- 229 (start date May 1)
June -- 251
July -- 369

The bottom line is this...

1) Compared to tens of thousands of referrals from Google, this is zero traffic. Heck, Google Zambia alone sends more!  From a pure traffic viewpoint, it has not been worth the time.  

2) However, is this the beginning of something more important, like Facebook selling their social graph to Bing to improve their Search Engine or even Facebook getting into the search game?...

Is there any value in the Search Rankings to see that 900 people "Like" anguilla-beaches.com? Since the engines can't "see" that, I doubt it. But it could be of value to Bing if they buy that info from Facebook.

So, its official status at SBI! is that we watch it. It's not critical now, but it may become important to Bing (a triumvirate of Bing-Yahoo!-Facebook seems to be forming) down the road. Or Facebook itself may come up with some clever Search that people flock to.

3) One more thing... Anguilla-beaches.com's Facebook "Like" page can't network and there are a lot of Anguilla-related Facebook pages (personal and business) that Nori (the owner) could be networking with. But since the Facebook page is under her personal account, all friending and other networking power is not available. The interactivity is better on a fan page in other ways, too.

Conclusion?

For now, the current recommendation is to not bother doing the "Like" page and instead do a Facebook fan page (if you have the time to "Facebook" your site at all).

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I'm expecting Facebook to offer the ability to convert the "like" page into a full business/fan page. The structure is very similar and it does not seem like a technically difficult challenge.

It makes sense, strategically -- it would make the "like" page the "onramp" to Facebook. Once started you discover you want more, but you don't want to give up what you've built.; So instead of locking us into a "lesser option," they should enable upgrading to full fan page.
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So that's it for the moment. If you want to do Facebook, do "the full Monty!" It's worth the extra effort.

All the best,