It used to be that getting liked on facebook was a sure-fire way to gauge your impact and success on facebook. Thus, the dangling iPads on offer (“Like us and win an iPad!”) or the ubiquitous, fairly vague sentence tacked onto the end of TV and print ads: “Like us on Facebook”. Perhaps people would, through incentives, cajoling or begging, follow, and the company would gain a few hundred followers, or a few thousand. But it wouldn’t matter. That number did not accurately reflect customer connection.

I’ll give you an example: I “liked” a bank that I don’t, and never will, bank with because they were raffling off a trip to … I forget where, somewhere with good looking beaches and tall, fruity cocktails. I never visited their page other than to click “like”. I forgot about it but after about a year I got round to unliking them because they were spamming my wall with rubbish titbits. If they counted my “like” as a reflection of consumer engagement, they were dead wrong.

In the beginning I suppose we fall back on what we know. The frantic drive for “likes” was a little like a “spray and pray” campaign: just trying to get the numbers up while relying on the miniscule conversion rate percentage.

The 800 million facebook users and the rapidly growing Twitter community attest to the fact that people want to engage on a person to person, human level with each other, brands, services and companies. And “liking” a page hardly counts as a meaningful engagement.

But “liking” is not completely defunct. A more meaningful “like” is the one done on individual posts. This is an indication that a person has read, looked at or in some way engaged with your content and appreciated it enough to “like” it. Remember, “liking” a post reflects on a person’s newsfeed, so it will have to be value-adding, interesting, quirky or cool enough for people to associate their personal page — and thus, their personal brand — with it.

Facebook is an important tool for companies and services as people have begun to use it as a search tool and as a way to interact on a more personal level with the company.  People can have a look at a page, comment, get information and leave without liking it.

Do you have ideas, tips or thoughts on the facebook “like” phenomenon? Share it with us here!

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