Facebook has announced today that due to popular demand it is adding a new button/feature to Facebook pages. Traditionally, users were asked to become fans of a page but that was changed a few months back. Facebook users are now asked to like a particular product or service and when they do this like is then added to their personal profile. This is also what Facebook uses to select which advertisements to display in a user’s account.
When a user has liked a product or service they then receive all of the updates from that page within their newsfeed. This is brilliant if you really love that particular brand and want to stay on top of what a brand is doing minute by minute. However, what happens if you are interested in what a brand does but you don’t particularly like that brand? How could you get its updates? The answer is nothing.
Facebook hasn’t really launched this feature but it would nice if they did. This isn’t one of mine as I got this idea from FiR the brilliant podcast by Neville Hobson and Shel Holtz. I an an avid listener and thought the idea of a ‘just interested button’ would be brilliant. I mean how many people are out there now that have liked something but they don’t really like it at all? This means they are receiving irrelevant advertisements and they are making a company look good (in terms of like numbers) when they don’t even like it.
What do you think Facebook should add to Facebook pages?
Chris Norton is the founder of Prohibition and an award winning communications consultant with more than twenty years’ experience. He was a lecturer at Leeds Beckett University and has had a varied PR career having worked both in-house and in a number of large consultancies. He is an Integrated PR and social media blogger and writes on a wide variety of blogs across a huge amount of topics from digital marketing, social media marketing right through to technology and crisis management.
