Would You “Like” To Become A Fan?
By Patrick Courtney
When Facebook unveiled its Open Graph platform in April, coined “the next evolution of Facebook,” perhaps the most important announcement was the introduction of the “Like” button. “Like” is Facebook’s effort to socialize the web by leveraging the social graph across the internet one line of HTML at a time. In doing so, Facebook also opted to revise the call to action on Pages from “Become A Fan” to “Like” to make pages more Open Graph-friendly.
While Like might make sense as an action for objects and products, Like’s place in the lexicon of customer advocacy has remained a popular topic of discussion. Brands have been rather perplexed as to what to call their legion of, dare we say followers.
We’ve seen brands change “Become A Fan” copy to “Like Us,” and some have taken the “Fan” copy down without a replacement. Still others (ex 2) have kept Fan for better or worse.
Facebook hasn’t made things any easier, populating their “Like Box” with the statement “Brand X has ### fans,” re-naming the Page wall filter from “Just Fans” to “Just Others,” (Others? Are we on Lost?), and providing this description in their Brand Permissions Guidelines:
“When inviting users to like your Page, say ‘like our Page’ or ‘become a fan by clicking Like on our Page.“
It seems this shift has struck a chord among consumers as well, as indicated by a recent Mashable poll which reported that ‘Become A Fan’ was more popular than ‘Like’ by nearly 2-1 among Mashable readers.
Some industry folks have summed up Like’s clumsiness in a recent tweets:
There are more serious implications under the surface of the language change, and ReadWriteWeb aptly covered these concerns a couple months back so I won’t get into that here.
For now, you might want to consider referencing Like as it pertains to the direct action of clicking the button on the page, and perhaps try other verbs such as “Connect” for less direct calls to action (such as a link to visit the page). Using Fan as a noun still works outside of Facebook and as a reference to users already connected to a page, but keep in mind that Facebook probably won’t be changing the Open Graph nomenclature any time soon so it’s going to be Like until it’s something else. I didn’t think ‘Become A Fan’ was the most universally contextual phrase for pages in the first place, preferring “Connect” or “Join” or “Subscribe” as a more accurate descriptor of the result of the opt-in action and to avoid blanketing consumers as having the same brand sentiment. But alas, if we’ve learned anything from Facebook it’s that they do what they “Like!”
