Facebook’s “like” button is genius. You see it attached to practically everything – from statuses to photos, comments to zombie application bite notifications. Read on to learn what it does and why it’s such a great idea.
1. The one click friendship
The “like” button allows you to maintain friendships with less effort than ever before. All it takes is a single click on the like button underneath a friend’s status or comment and you can show them you still know they exist and that you care for them. Never before has maintaining friendship been so quick and easy – all it takes is just one click and you’ve had an interaction. Efficient friendship is particularly useful to businesses who want to reach out to customers but are low on time and resources – just “like: everything fans say and you’ll quickly build up a happy online community around your business, Hermes T style.
If instead Richard “liked” my post he’d have saved himself approximately 5 keystrokes
2. Encourages People to Post Good Content
When someone “likes” one of your actions on Facebook you feel flattered. When a lot of people like it you feel downright smug. Feeling this way encourages you to repeat that behavior or something analogous. For example if you post an album of yourself naked, and then 10 people like it, you are going to be socially incentivized to post another similar album, just to get an extra hit of that good feeling. The bottom line: getting content liked is going to make you feel good so you are going to use Facebook more.
Being “liked” online can quickly become an addiction. Just ask this frog.
3. Improve experience for all Facebook users
By using good feeling to incentivize Facebook content producers (content being photos, statuses etc.) to produce even more liked content, the Facebook experience is improved for users in general. There is now going to be even more great photos, comments and statuses for everyone to enjoy, resulting in higher usage of the site by everyone.
Success! Facebook wins
4. Recommendation algorithms
Facebook uses sophisticated algorithms to determine who/what turns up on your Homepage. If you have 1000 friends there is an enormous variety of content that could potentially appear on the homepage. Yet, Facebook narrows this down to around 50 handpicked items. How does it do this? My guess is that one of the biggest determinants as to which content is push into your home feed (the “highlights” if you will) is how liked that content is. If every one of your friends likes John’s photo album from his trip to Mongolia in 98, then chances are you’d like it too so Facebook puts it on your home stream. By putting good content right in front of you, rather than leaving you to find it on your own, your chance of getting “hooked” and using Facebook more, is increased. Bottom line: you use it more.
Anyone else see any purpose the like button has? Or uses it could be put to in other sites, real or conceptual? Comment below.
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