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How To Trick People Into Becoming Your Fans On Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg
<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/prospere/2927109217/">Ludovic Toinel</a>

Display ads on Facebook come with the familiar -- and now ubiquitous -- Like button. But there are two very different things that clicking that Like button can mean -- and the distinction is not at all clear to the average user.

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Facebook first added the ability to Like ads almost a year ago. Users could click Like to indicate that they were pleased with the ad; that information would be used to improve ad targeting; furthermore, once you Liked an ad, that fact would be displayed with the Like button if the same ad was served up to any of your friends.

Recently, among the many controversial changes Facebook made, the company replaced the option to "Become a Fan" of brand or product pages with the option to Like them. This was purely a change in language -- the people who Like a brand are added to a list which that brand can spam on Facebook or through email as it sees fit.

Facebook has always allowed advertisers to recruit fans directly from its display ads. So now, there are two very different Like buttons in Facebook ads:

  • Ads that send users to a page outside Facebook. Here, the advertisers can write any headline on the ads they like. If a user Likes the ad, he is Liking that ad, without signing up for further communication.
  • Ads that send users to the advertiser's Facebook page. The headline of the ad has to be the name of the page, but they can include whatever text they want in the body. If a user Likes the ad, he has become a fan of the page, ripe for spamming.
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When Facebook announced the language change, it claimed there would be no confusion here:

Users will understand the distinction through explicit social context, messaging and aesthetic differences.

Facebook ad comparison
Before-and-after clicking these two ads.

Nonsense. As you can see here, the two types of ads are indistinguishable, though Facebook does tell you what you've Liked after the fact, and gives you the option to Unlike it.

In a terrific guest post at All Facebook, Dennis Yu of BlitzLocal explains the opportunity this presents advertisers. Brands can use text expressing a sentiment users want to Like, or even offer rewards for clicking Like, and thus recruit fans who don't realize what they're doing.

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This is also a huge plus for Facebook, since it makes ads that keep users on the social network more valuable than ads that send the user elsewhere.

But it's difficult to see this as anything other than a deliberate attempt to confuse its users.

(Dennis's entire post, which details how his company earned the Weekly World News 40,000 fans in just four days, is well worth reading, and contains a lot of useful advice for Facebook advertisers. Check it out.)

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